Giant pink pills

Today I came to the realization that I'm sick of being sick and my attempts to fight off whatever it is that's been making me miserable just aren't working. This afternoon I had a meeting scheduled with one of the physicians at the project, and when he walked in, he actually stopped himself short from asking "How are you?" and instead stated the obvious "You're not well." I agreed and asked him if he could do anything to help. "Is your cough productive?" "No." "Do you have a fever or headache?" "Yes." "Congestion?" "Terrible." And, voila, there was my prescription. It was barely legible (as prescriptions tend to be), but I proceeded straight to the pharmacy in town to have it filled.

The pharmacy was a separate adventure. I walked into a large room lined with shelves of medicines from which I was separated by a counter. There were three women in white at the counter and I chose one at random. I approached, said "Bonjour" and presented her with my prescription. She glanced at it for just a second and began typing furiously on her calculator. Immediately I began to wonder if it were possible to be charged a muzungu price at a pharmacy and whether it would be rude if I protested when she told me the total. But then she tore off a scrap of paper, scribbled an amount on it and pointed to another woman who was obviously the cashier. I took the scrap of paper and realized that it said 750 francs ($1.50) and decided protesting was unnecessary. I then paid the cashier and returned to the first woman with my receipt. Before I had even handed her my receipt, she had pulled one of the hundreds of boxes from the shelves behind the counter and was counting out fifteen enormous, bright pink pills.

Desperate for anything that might make me feel better, I swallowed one of the pills as soon as I got home. I then realized I had no idea what I had taken and decided to look up the ingredients listed on the blister pack. The first blurb I found on the first ingredient said "derived from coal tar, it is the active metabolite of phenacetin, but unlike phenacetin, paracetamol has not been shown to be carcinogenic." I was worried. I was worried until I looked further down the page and saw that in the U.S., "paracetamol" is known as "acetaminophen." I breathed a sigh of relief and went on to look up the remaining ingredients. (For anyone who was curious, they were all pain relievers and antihistamines.)

Hopefully I'll start feeling better soon!

Family day at the embassy

The U.S. recently finished building a new embassy in Kigali, and yesterday, the marines who are stationed and live there hosted a family day. The event lasted all afternoon and was a included a true American cookout (hotdogs, hamburgers, potato salad, etc.), games (water balloon toss, tug-of-war, three-legged race, sack race, etc.) and a live band called 'Black Bluzungu'. It was a little strange to be around so many very-American things all at once, but it was really nice to spend the afternoon outside and we had a lot of fun.

Prayer quilt

Today I received a wonderful package from home. In addition to my favorite cookies from Central America, my black scarf that I've been missing since I left it at home over Christmas, delicious trail mix complete with M&Ms and a beautiful ceramic cross (all of which are absolutely incredible!), the package contained a particularly meaningful gift from my home church, Buncombe Street United Methodist Church in Greenville, South Carolina. The gift is a quilt, approximately five feet by five feet, made by one of the women of the church in beautiful colors of red, yellow and green. Before making the journey across the Atlantic Ocean, I've been told that the quilt hung in the lobby of the church. There, members of the church prayed for my time and work in Rwanda and, as they did so, each tied a knot in green thread that hangs where squares of fabric meet on the front of the quilt, so that now the green thread is full of knots.
The quilt is absolutely beautiful and I am truly humbled by it. I really don't know the words to express how much it means to me, knowing the time, thoughts and prayers that went into the creation of this wonderful gift. To anyone from Buncombe Street who reads this blog, I want to say simply, thank you. Thank you for your prayers and your support and your thoughts and your encouragement. I am so blessed and so honored to be a member of such a strong church family. Although it's draped across the back of my couch right now, please know that this beautiful quilt will hang in the hallway of my house where I'll pass by it and think of you daily.

Sick and tired

I've felt myself getting sick for the past several days and I've tried to fight it off, but today, it finally caught up to me. I woke up with a splitting headache, realized I felt absolutely awful and decided it would be best not to go to work. So I laid around in bed until around 11:30 and then got up and moved to my living room. Not much more awaited me there than in my room, and I realized the trouble with being sick in Rwanda (other than feeling terrible and missing work) is that it's really quite boring.

I can't even remember what I find to do when I'm sick in the U.S. (watch mindless television and DVDs of movies I've seen dozens of times?), but whatever it is, there is decidedly less of it here. I suppose I spent the afternoon napping (a good thing since I haven't been sleeping well), watching the last of the DVD extras from season one of Survivor (I told you there wasn't much to do), looking around on the internet (I'm now caught up on news, sports scores, friends' blogs and useless knowledge) and, as you can see, making some changes to this site.

Holding my breath

Some mornings when I'm working in the clinic, ordering serologic lab tests for our HIV-negative clients to check whether they've contracted the virus, I find myself holding my breath, praying silently that the test results will be negative, that today won't be the day that we discover another individual is infected. Often my prayers are answered and all the test results are negative. But some days someone tests positive and one more individual is added to the tens of millions living with HIV/AIDS. So I continue to hold my breath and pray.

My guard thinks I'm crazy

My guard thinks I'm crazy. I'm almost certain of it. I mean, he must. As he patrols around the house and the yard in the evenings before I've shut the curtains, he sometimes sees me talking and gesturing to myself while I sit alone at the kitchen table. Occasionally he's curious enough to walk on the front porch, trying to peek subtly to figure out what I'm doing. But how could I sit and talk to myself like that without having something wrong with my head?

If only he knew that I was not talking to myself, but to my family and friends in the United States, using a headset and a computer with wireless internet. I wonder if that would make him think I was more or less crazy, though, if I had the vocabulary in Kinyarwanda to explain. Honestly, I doubt it would make much of a difference. I'm pretty sure he would still think I'm crazy.

Favorite flowers

I am so in love with the flowers in Rwanda. They're gorgeous and come in every colour and every shape. And they grow everywhere - on the side of the road, in my yard, in front of buildings, etc. My favorites, though, come from the market. Every time I'm in the Kimironko market, I stop by the same stall (where I think the vendor now knows me) to buy white calla lilies and whatever these beautiful orange-pink flowers are. I love that I live somewhere where I can constantly have fresh fresh flowers in the house. Somehow even the smallest bunch can brighten up the entire place.

Laundry or chickens?

While at the market this weekend, I bought a huge woven basket that's about two and a half feet tall. In my head, it seemed like the perfect thing to use for a laundry basket. (Yes, I've been here over eight months and I'm just now buying a laundry basket; it wasn't exactly a high priority.) After buying the enormous basket (for 1,000 francs - less than two dollars), I felt like I'd seen the same basket before, but I couldn't remember where. After a few minutes, I remembered - these are the large baskets that men fill with live chickens and use to carry them through town or to the market.

Bizarre

It's not uncommon for completely bizarre things to happen without anyone seeming to notice or care. This morning I wasn't feeling very well when I woke up, so I decided to call in sick to work and get a little extra rest, lest I catch one of the bugs going around town right now. Since it's a beautiful day and since I get better wireless internet outside than inside, I was sitting on my front porch, enjoying some fruit and checking my email, when I saw some movement out of the corner of my eye. I looked up towards the wall that separates my house from my office and saw a man in a red Terracom (the internet company in Rwanda) jumpsuit standing on the wall. He looked just as shocked to see me as I was to see him, so much so, in fact, that I was afraid he might fall off the wall. I motioned that it was alright for him to come over and he pulled his ladder over to my side of the fence and proceeded to work on the internet cable that runs from my office across my house and to the project building on the other side of my house. It was just one of many situations that is completely bizarre and yet completely normal.
(This is the view looking out from my porch toward my office. You can see the wall in between.)

Passover Seder

Today I participated in my first Passover Seder, and I really enjoyed it. The Seder is a dinner that is usually held on the first night of passover. It's not just a meal though; it involves much ritual and tradition. The focus of the Seder is the Haggadah, the story of the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt, and the telling of this story, especially to children. The story includes stories and blessings and songs and prayers, as well as traditions such as eating six symbolic foods from the Seder plate and drinking four cups of wine. Although an ancient and traditionally Jewish custom, I found that the Seder was very relevant to the modern world where slavery and bondage still exist in so many forms - social, economic, ethnic, etc. - and to the Christian faith which has the same roots in the story of the exodus.

Plus, dinner was delicious (if I'm allowed to say so myself, since I cooked most of it) and the company was great. I would have enjoyed the evening even if it had only been dinner with such a good group of friends.

Being Jewish in central Africa

After work today, I headed to the Kimironko market (one of the largest markets in Kigali) to help a friend who's preparing to host a Seder on Sunday night. (The Seder is a traditional, ritual feast that marks the beginning of Passover.) We had already decided on a menu so we were going to the market to pick up all the ingredients we needed. The experience ended up being hilarious.

We entered the market through the fabric and clothing section and had the bright idea of having kippah made with traditional Rwandan chitenge. So we stopped at one of the stalls of a fabric vendor and began the process. Since Judaism isn't exactly common in Rwanda, no one had any idea what we wanted, so we had to describe exactly how we wanted the "petits chapeaux" (little hats) to be made. What followed was a conversation that at times included as many as six to eight people, drawings on the back of a random piece of cardboard, random scraps of fabric from the nearby sewing machine, elaborate hand motions, demonstrations and measurements on various persons' heads and much hilarity. After at least half an hour of this, when we were convinced the tailors might have some vague idea of what we wanted, we left with the understanding that we would return in a bit to see a sample.

While waiting for the sample to be made, we headed toward the food section of the market. The first item we decided to look for was chicken liver for chopped liver. When we finally found the chicken section, at the opposite end of the market, of course, we picked a stall and began to try to ask for liver. After stopping several passers-by to ask "do you speak French?", "do you speak English?", "what is the word for 'liver' in Kinyarwanda?", etc., we were able to communicate what we were looking for to the man who owned the stall. He then pulled a chicken out of his small cooler and pointed at it, telling us that the liver was inside the chicken. I'm sure he thought we were crazy when we then explained that we just wanted the liver, without the rest of the chicken. After more multi-lingual conversation, he said that he would have the liver by ten o'clock on Sunday morning.

The next venture took us to the produce section where we quickly obtained a following of half a dozen people. We began with potatoes, which we wanted for roasting. We were specifically looking for small potatoes (the size of red potatoes in the U.S.), and before long had a dozen men running around the potato section of the market, picking out the smallest potatoes they could find for our approval. Eighty potatoes later, we moved on to finding leeks for potato leek soup. One of the young men who was following us literally ran from us when he realized what we were looking for and came back a few minutes later with the largest leeks we'd seen. Soon a number of other people were running around and coming up to us with various vegetables - "cilantro?" "tomatoes?" "onions?" "legumes?" Before long, we were seeing vegetables and spices that we'd never seen before in Rwanda and just buying them because we were so surprised to find them and because we were so impressed with the vendors' commitment to finding something we would buy. Soon we had two large bags filled with potatoes, tomatoes, avocado, leeks, fennel, basil, green beans, mint and who knows what else. Note that finding all of this produce involved translating between English, French and Kinyarwanda and bartering for prices, both of which added quite a bit of time and quite a few laughs to the shopping experience.

We headed back across the market to check on the "petits chapeaux" and found two samples. The first sample - a traditional Muslim hat - must have been a guess based on our comment that the hats were for a religious festival. The second one - a large disc that vaguely resembled an oversized beanie - was closer. More hand gestures, demonstrations and explanations, and we left with a plan to return on Sunday morning to pick up fifteen of the final product.

I'm sure the written description isn't nearly as amusing as the entire experience; I really wish we could have caught it all on camera. It was absolutely hilarious, and, typical of life in Rwanda, each thing took so much more effort than it seemed it should have. But we either found or made plans to return for most things on our list, and I'll now admit that being Jewish in Rwanda is no simple task.

New to Kigali

I realized tonight just how easy it is to identify people who have just recently arrived in Kigali from those of us who have been here a while. I went to a party at a house where fourteen interns for an international non-governmental organization are living for four months. These fourteen have been in Rwanda for almost three weeks, and while that may seem like a decent bit of time, I realized tonight that it's really not. Two of my friends and I were the first to arrive at the party. While we walked in wearing jeans or casual skirts with basic shirts and scarves, the interns were wearing the latest fashions from the rest of the world, dressed to the nines in cocktail dresses or cute pants and tops, all complete with high heels. At first I wondered whether we were just under-dressed for the occasion (which was Saturday night), but as more and more people arrived, I realized that it seemed to be a difference based on how long we had been in Kigali. It became easy to look around the room or the porch and identify who was new to Kigali and who was not. The new ones were much more well-dressed, had put on makeup and had used straighteners and curlers to fix their hair. The rest of us had thought we were doing well by wearing clean clothes and showering (neither of which is always an easy feat).

I think I may be in fashion trouble when I leave Africa.

Chitenge

Today, I am "smart" and I am "Rwandan," or, at least, that's what my Rwandan coworkers have told me. They're not saying this because I've become any more intelligent or changed my nationality; they're saying this because instead of wearing my usual uniform of kakhis (or similar pants/shirt (usually a plain t-shirt or polo) / denim jacket, I'm wearing chitenge.

Chitenge is the brightly-colored, boldly-patterned fabric that is so completely prevalent here. The women wear it daily, either tailored into a beautiful dress or wrapped as a sarong; they use it as an elaborately-wrapped headscarf; they tie it around themselves to hold their children to their backs. Chitenge is an integral part of Rwanda and of Africa.

I've bought several pieces of chitenge in the markets over the past months, but it's only this week that I've had any of it tailored into a wearable form. A tailor who several of the nurses at the project use came about a week and a half ago, and I decided to have her make a skirt for me with one of the pieces of chitenge I'd bought. After describing what I wanted the skirt to look like, I remembered that it's unthinkable in the Rwandan mind to wear a skirt without a matching top. Since the nurses were also insisting that I have a top made, I let them discuss in rapid Kinyarwanda what it would look like, and my order was placed.

This Wednesday, the tailor returned with the finished product, and I must admit, I was very impressed. She had obviously paid close attention to detail - aligning the pattern of the fabric so that it was centered and fit with the design of the pieces, covering the zipper, lining both the skirt and the top - and everything fit almost perfectly.
I showed a couple of the nurses who were nearby and they were thrilled. They made me turn in circles so they could see all sides and insisted that I wear my new clothes to our weekly clinic meeting on Friday (today). So here I am, brightly dressed from neck to knee in chitenge - "smart" and "Rwandan".

God sleeps in Rwanda

"When God wanders the world,
at the end of the day, He comes to Rwanda to sleep
because he considers this to be the most beautiful place on earth."

(Rwandan proverb)

Language

Language in Rwanda is absolutely fascinating. Everyone speaks the local language, Kinyarwanda, and most also speak, or at least understand, Swahili. French, which was the predominant language in the schools until the mid-1990s, is the most common Western language in the country, but since the new government came into power after the war of 1994 (the genocide is always referred to as "the war" or "the war of 1994), English has become an official language and is also taught in the schools. So for expatriates, none of whom it seems can speak a word of Kinyarwanda, it's best to first use French to communicate with someone, and only to use English if the person responds in English. However, there are always exceptions. For example, Rwandans who fled during the war to neighboring Anglophone countries like Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania most often speak more English than French, so using French will get you nowhere. Of course there is no way to know which language to speak until you begin a conversation.

Most of my conversations, whether with persons I know or with strangers, involve a combination of all three languages - Kinyarwanda, French and English. With coworkers, a conversation may go something like this:

Me: Maramutse! (Good morning!)
Rwandan coworker: Maramutse! Amakuru? (Good morning. How are you?)
Me: Nimeza. (I am fine.) How was your weekend?
Rwandan coworker: It was very good. How was yours?
Me: It was very good. Thank you.
Rwandan coworker: Good. Est-ce que vous avez le câble de mon ordinateur? (Do you have the cable for my computer?)
Me: Oui, mais ça ne fonctionne pas. Je vais acheter un nouveau en ville aujourd'hui. (Yes, but it does not work. I am going to buy a new one in town today.)
Rwandan coworker: Ah, merci. (Ah, thank you.)
Me: De rien. (You're welcome.) I'll bring it to you later.

The conversation is also mixed with taxi drivers, though French usually dominates these conversations:

Me: Bonjour. (Hello.)
Taxi driver: (Kinyarwandan grunt and nod of acknowledgement)
Me: Je voudrais aller à Kimihurura. (I want to go to Kimihurura.)
Taxi driver: Où en Kimihurura? (Where in Kimihurura?)
Me: Près de le restaurant Papyrus. Ou près de le restaurant Hellenique. (Near the restaurant Papyrus. Or near the restaurant Hellenique.)
Taxi driver: (Look of confusion.)
Me: The middle of the hill. (Kimihurura is a neighborhood of town situated on the side of a hill, so the price for a taxi depends on where you want to go on the hill.)
Taxi driver: The middle?
Me: The middle. Oui, le milieu de la colline. C'est combien? (Yes, the middle of the hill. How much is it?)
Taxi driver: Huit cents. (800.)
Me: Huit cent!? (800!?)
Taxi driver: Eight hundred.
Me: Oya. Non. C'est beaucoup. C'est cher! (No (in Kinyarwanda). No (in French). It is a lot. It is expensive!) (This is said loudly, skeptically and indignantly to show that I am not a tourist and refuse to pay the muzungu - white person - price.)
Me: Quatre cents. (400.)
Taxi driver: Non, seis cents. (No, 600.)
Me: Non. Toujours c'est quatre cents à Kimihurura. (No. It is always 400 to Kimihurura.) (This is also said skeptically and indignantly.)
Taxi driver: (Kinyarwandan head gesture to come)
Me: Quatre cents? (400?) (Checking that I am coming under the assumption of paying my price of 400 rather than his price of 600)
Taxi driver: (Kinyarwandan eyebrow raise of acknowledgement)
Me: Sawa, sawa. (Ok, it is fine.)

Conversations in the market usually require more Kinyarwanda on my part and are therefore even more mixed:

Me: (browsing thin, clear plastic bags filled with various powders) Qu'est-ce que c'est? (What is this?)
Rwandan woman: Farine. (Flour.)
Me: (shaking my head to say "no")
Rwandan woman: Qu'est-ce que vous cherchez? (What are you looking for?)
Me: Je cherche... (I am looking for...) (as I try to remember the French word for "sugar")
Rwandan woman: (holding up various bags to ask if any of them are what I'm looking for)
Me: Isukari! Nda shaka isukari. (Sugar! (remembering the Kinyarwanda word for "sugar") I am looking for sugar.)
Rwandan woman: Ah! (holding up a bag of sugar) Sept cents. (700.)
Me: Sept cents? Sawa. Murakoze. (700? Ok. Thank you.)
Rwandan woman: Murakoze nawe. (Thank you to you also.)

Although the combination of languages is usually amusing in most settings, it can be just as confusing. Take, for example, a conversation that happened this morning in my office:

American coworker: What does "ashante" mean in Kinyarwanda?
Me: I don't know.
Rwandan coworker: It means "to sing."
American coworker: "To sing"? But people say it all the time. By itself. Are you sure that's what it means?
Rwandan coworker: Yes, of course.
Another Rwandan coworker: No, it doesn't. "Ashante" is not a word in Kinyarwanda.
American coworker: What?
Me (with a light bulb appearing over my head, as in a cartoon): Wait, what word is it?
American coworker: "Ashante."
Me: Are you sure they're speaking Kinyarwanda?
American coworker: I think so.
Me: I think they're speaking French. The word is "enchanté."
American coworker: "Ashante" is a French word? What does it mean?
Me: No, it's "enchanté" and it means "delighted" or "it's a pleasure" or something like that. You say it when you first meet someone or when you respond to someone saying "thank you."
American coworker: Ohhhhh. That makes much more sense than "to sing."

And so the conversations go, with mixed languages and even more mixed understandings, so I continue to study and practice both French and Kinyarwanda.

Vacation in Kigali

Every now and then, even though my life isn't particularly "hard" in Kigali, it's nice to take a vacation. The easiest vacation is at the Serena Hotel here in town. Although it's just a few blocks from my house, it's an entirely different world, so once in a while, it's nice to treat ourselves to a lazy day by the pool.

Vegetables!

I finally have vegetables in the garden! They're not quite ready to eat, but they're definitely there. I took my usual series of pictures this week, with each of the beds - radishes, carrots, squash and zucchini, cucumber, spinach and cabbage and tomatoes.
I also took a few close up pictures of everything. There's cabbage:
The spinach looked a lot better before I picked a bunch of it today. I should have taken the picture before instead of after!
I think these plants are cucumbers, but I'm not entirely sure. I guess I'll know once they start blooming.
Lots of baby zucchinis:
And lots of squash, too:
The radishes are also growing well and should be ready before long.

Continued reminders

Even though the genocide has been at the forefront of everyone's mind this week during its annual commemoration, some have had more personal experiences than others. Josh Ruxin, a board member of Orphans of Rwanda, an organization for which two of my closest friends in Rwanda work, who lives here in Kigali, published the following article this week in the New York Times blog. I think it's a pretty incredible reminder of the impact that the genocide still has on everyone here even though it's been fourteen years since it happened.

14 Years Later
by: Josh Ruxin

April 7, 2008, was the 14th anniversary of the commencement of Rwanda’s genocide. With periodic massacres that date back to 1959, Rwanda’s genocide did not happen overnight. Its climax, however, began April 7, 1994. It was a few days later that 36-year-old Epafrodite Rugengamanzi was murdered. From what his sister, Josepha, has gathered, he was chased into the yard of the house where we now live, brutally killed, and buried. Her brother’s killer confessed to the murder during gacaca — the traditional court process for genocide suspects — and brought her to his burial spot.
Josepha came to our house Wednesday with other family members and dug up her brother’s skeleton. The orchestrated process took several hours. Once they were sure that all of his bones had been collected, they carefully cleaned them. Josepha then asked me and my family to come over and listen to their testimony (and asked us to share it with others). Josepha was smiling and told us how lucky she felt to have found her brother’s bones and to be able to re-bury them shortly at Gisozi, the national genocide museum and burial ground.
Epafrodite’s murder was avoidable, since the UN had the power to prevent it. Ultimately it was not an international team of peacekeepers who brought Rwanda’s genocide to a close, but rather, the Rwanda Patriotic Army, a disciplined military force drawn from Rwanda’s diaspora. After years of fighting, the Rwanda Patriotic Army on July 4, 1994, brought stability to the country. Human Rights Watch, a French judge, and a Spanish judge allege, however, that the Rwanda Patriotic Army carried out thousands of reprisal killings and crimes against humanity during and after the genocide. President Kagame publicly bristled this past week over the recent Spanish indictment.

A close look at the complexities of Rwanda’s genocide would remind China’s leader Hu Jintao, President Bush and others of the path history can take, yet does not have to. Darfur is at least beginning to take on some of the dimensions of Rwanda: a gradual genocide in a region still lacking an adequate peacekeeping force and the political commitment to bring it to an end. The carnage there continues and now a new genocide threatens in Southern Sudan. While hope has so far proven elusive for Sudan, it is even harder to imagine that its people will get themselves on Rwanda’s track to peace and prosperity anytime in the next few decades. Rwanda’s resilience and approach are exceptional.

My friend and head of Orphans of Rwanda, Jean Baptiste Ntakirutimana, wrote me the other day about his meeting last week with his mother’s killer: “I inquired first about his life in prison, his family and his state of mind. He said he was expecting that I could kill him, which he thinks was the way of doing justice for having killed my mum. He added that no one dared killing my mum; that she was brought by two militia to her home village and called for people to come and kill her. No one did so besides him who felt he had to kill her. In fact he told us that they were told that no one was allowed to loot from Tutsis before killing all their family members. Since they thought I was already killed from Kigali, where I was residing, the only hindrance to take all the family property was my mum. So she had to be killed. By the time he started explaining how he killed her I partly lost consciousness. I prayed to God to give me His spirit to revive me and give me more strength to continue, as I felt it was His mission I was on. Miraculously I felt warmth from my head to my feet, I felt like a big rock melting from my chest and my head. I felt very refreshed, cleaned up my tears and carried on the conversation tremendously relieved from my whole being. I then told him that I have personally been forgiven all my wrong from God and that it is in the same spirit that I was coming to him offering him pardon myself. Then it was like a huge veil off his face he started smiling with a lot of words of gratitude. He started holding my hands and telling me many other things I couldn’t expect about himself and the reality around the genocide. He agreed to go and see other people for whose family members he killed.”

Fourteen years later, Rwandans are still struggling to reconcile the past. The struggle, however, is proving easier against a backdrop of national stability, economic growth, and a rising national profile. Foreign investment is at a high, there are swank hotels, and tourists are coming by the thousands.

Post-genocide history is mired in enduring civil conflict and instability. Rwandans know firsthand that exports such as peace and stability are far superior to tales of disaster, massacres, and corruption. Rather than provide the object lesson of what can go wrong, Rwanda now embodies quite a different ideal. The nation was one of the first to send peacekeepers to Darfur and today has one of the largest contingents on the ground. Nothing points more clearly to Rwanda’s recovery and resolve.

Tortillas

Tortillas are a staple part of my diet when I'm in the States. Here in Rwanda, though, they're pretty much impossible to find, so this week I decided to take a stab at making them myself. The end result could probably pass as pita or chapati or any other flat bread, but they're close enough to tortillas to make me happy!

Vaccine search is vital

In response to the article from the AIDS Healthcare Foundation (see 'Enough is enough'), several leaders in the HIV/AIDS research community, including Dr. Eric Hunger, who works closely with Projet San Francisco and our field sites in Zambia, published another article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Vaccine search is vital in HIV/AIDS arsenal
by: Mark Mulligan, James Curran, Eric Hunter, Carlos del Rio

In an April 7 opinion column, Drs. Homayoon Khanlou and Michael Weinstein of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation made several statements with which we strongly disagree ("The best way to fight AIDS," @issue).

Global access to HIV/AIDS prevention, testing and antiretroviral treatment is inadequate, and increased funding is needed. We strongly disagree, however, with the suggestion by Khanlou and Weinstein that the best way to fight AIDS is to end government funding for HIV vaccine research and to redirect those funds to prevention, testing and treatment.

History teaches that it is wrong to take an either/or approach to the provision of health care services and vaccine research. In the U.S., despite sustained prevention efforts and widespread use of antiretroviral treatment, 40,000 people are infected with HIV each year. Globally, more than 33 million are infected with HIV. UNAIDS estimates that in 2007, 2.5 million people became infected and 2.1 million deaths occurred from AIDS. Each day, 6,800 persons become infected and 5,700 die from AIDS.

Despite impressive initial steps in antiretroviral rollout in developing countries - due to the U.S. President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief and other programs - only a fraction of those in need of treatment have received it. The number of HIV-infected persons being treated with antiretroviral drugs in less developed countries is fewer than either the number of deaths or new infections in a single year. Since therapy does not cure HIV, every new infection represents a person who ultimately must be treated for life.

More attention to HIV prevention is urgently needed, and quality education, counseling and testing and other services are warranted. Even when these are fully utilized, it is likely that the number of new infections will remain high.

New and better HIV prevention interventions are clearly required. Historically, vaccines have been the most effective weapons against infectious diseases. The world desperately needs a vaccine for HIV prevention. Khanlou and Weinstein incorrectly stated that there is no precedent for a vaccine against the retroviruses, the viral family to which HIV belongs. Veterinarians administer a vaccine for protection against the leading viral killer of cats, a retrovirus called feline leukemia virus.

Research is a time-consuming process of trial and error, hypothesis generation and testing, refinement and retesting. Vaccine development historically has taken decades, with each interim result contributing new knowledge. The recent clinical trial called the Step Study tested one candidate HIV vaccine. It was disappointing that the vaccine did not protect those who received it. But the study was successful in that it was well-executed and efficiently provided an answer, albeit not the desired one.

History provides powerful lessons. The virus that causes polio was discovered in the 1930s. Initial vaccines tested in the 1930s were ineffective. In the 1940s and early 1950s, summertime polio epidemics caused fear and panic in industrialized countries. Fortunately, vaccine research continued despite initial failures. Progress was based on incremental scientific advances such as the discovery in 1949 by John Enders and his colleagues of how to grow the polio virus in the laboratory. Six years later Jonas Salk's inactivated, injected polio vaccine became available.

By 1957, the number of new polio cases annually had fallen by 90 percent, and over time - thanks to sustained scientific effort even in the face of early failures - the iron lung became a museum relic. Imagine if the polio vaccine developers had given up after 20 years, or after a couple of failed vaccine trials.

The National Institutes of Health Summit on HIV Vaccine Research and Development was held in Washington on March 25, led by Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. At this meeting of vaccine and AIDS scientists, care providers and community members, Fauci unequivocally expressed the government's commitment to sustained HIV vaccine research. Based on the input of the summit participants, NIAID will review the balance of resources devoted to HIV/AIDS research and make adjustments to match the state of the science.

Funding for HIV vaccine research must not be cut. If anything, it needs to be increased. Persistence, sustained scientific effort and increased collaboration will drive the quest for an HIV vaccine forward - just as they did for the polio vaccine.

Mark Mulligan is executive director of the Hope Clinic of the Emory Vaccine Center. James Curran is dean of the Rollins School of Public Health and co-director of the Center for AIDS Research at Emory University. Eric Hunter is a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at Emory and co-director of Emory's Center for AIDS Research. Carlos del Rio is a professor of medicine at Emory and co-director of the university's Center for AIDS Research.

Enough is enough

There has been something of an argument this week in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution over the most appropriate way to proceed in the fight against HIV/AIDS. The first article was published by the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, the largest nonprofit HIV/AIDS organization in the U.S.

Enough Is Enough
by: Homayoon Khanlou and Michael Weinstein

To control AIDS, funding must be invested in strategies that work: effective prevention efforts, routine testing and universal access to treatment - and not spent on expensive vaccine research that over 20 years has yielded little of promise other than discovering how not to make an AIDS vaccine.

The latest round of vaccine trial failures (including a large-scale Merck trial halted when the vaccine turned out to have possibly increased subjects' risk of acquiring HIV) has added to a growing consensus in the scientific community that an AIDS vaccine is a decade or more away, if one can be developed at all.

Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, recently stated: "We have to leave open the possibility...that we might never get a vaccine for HIV." That view was shared by leading AIDS expert David Baltimore, who conceded last month that the scientific community is no closer now to discovering an HIV vaccine than it was 20 years ago.

Twenty years of research and the fact remains: A vaccine against a retrovirus, the family of viruses HIV belongs to, has never been successfully developed. It is highly unlikely that there will be an AIDS vaccine - certainly not by any current definition of the word.

Despite this record of failure, the U.S. budget for HIV vaccine research continues to increase, more than doubling between 2000 and 2006 from $327 million to $854 million.

Meanwhile, funding for HIV/AIDS care in the U.S. has flat-lined. And around the world, millions are dying for lack of access to a 5-cent condom, a $15 HIV test or antiretroviral therapy costing as little as 50 cents a day.

It is time to stop the waste.

We already know what a successful AIDS control program looks like: effective prevention, routine testing and access to treatment. Government funding of AIDS vaccine research should be ended and this money put to more productive, and lifesaving, uses. If funding being poured into HIV vaccine research were applied to these strategies, much could be achieved.

Though undiagnosed HIV infection is responsible for most new cases, routine testing is still far from reality in the U.S. or abroad. It is estimated that one-quarter of the over 1 million Americans living with HIV/AIDS are unaware they are infected; if the majority of the 250,000 undiagnosed cases were diagnosed over the next five years, new infections could be reduced by as much as 50 percent. Likewise for the estimated 20 million people in the world who are HIV-positive but do not know it: Applying $1 billion toward the rapid scale-up of HIV testing worldwide would likely prevent millions of new infections.

Achieving universal access to treatment would make the most significant contribution to a drop in AIDS deaths and in HIV transmission rates worldwide.

Largely because of programs such as PEPFAR (the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief), 2 million people in the developing world are receiving treatment - a tremendous feat. However, this is only a small fraction of those who need it and who will die without it. A billion dollars a year in U.S. vaccine funding will do nothing to prevent that.

Bolstering the case for increasing access to treatment is a recent study conducted by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicating that AIDS drugs render an HIV-positive person significantly less infectious. The study of married couples, conducted over three years in Uganda, assessed the long-term effect of antiretroviral treatment on HIV transmission. Results demonstrate up to a 90 percent reduction in the likelihood that an HIV-positive husband will infect his partner if he is receiving prevention counseling services and antiretroviral drug treatment.

Inhibiting the virus' ability to replicate, antiretroviral drugs lower what is known as the viral load in a person's system, often to such a degree that the virus, while not eliminated, becomes undetectable. Scale-up of treatment worldwide must be our highest priority.

On Tuesday, Dr. Fauci will convene a summit of top leaders in Bethesda to "rethink strategy and perhaps plot new directions for the flow of federal tax dollars" for HIV vaccine research. Their course should be clear.

Suspending U.S. funding for an HIV vaccine and investing in strategies that save lives and stop new infections is the wisest and most effective use of limited public resources. And with thousands of lives lost daily because people around the world lack access to proven, effective and relatively inexpensive prevention and treatment options, it is also the only moral choice.

Dr. Homayoon Khanlou is chief of medicine in the U.S. for the AIDS Healthcare Foundation. Michael Weinstein is president of the foundation.

Definition of genocide

Genocide was defined in 1948 in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide as:

Any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

The graves are not yet full

This weekend I finished reading a book by Bill Berkeley, titled, "The Graves are Not Yet Full," named after an announcement played on Radio-Télévision Libre des Mille Collines in Rwanda in 1994.

You have missed some of the enemies.
You must go back there and finish them off.
The graves are not yet full!

The book addresses cases of genocide and war in six African countries - Liberia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Africa, Sudan, Uganda and Rwanda - and examines these conflicts not as the results of age-old tribal hatreds, but as calculated means used by tyrannical leaders to exploit ethnic divisions for their own benefit. Before Berkeley analyzes these issues in detail, though, he begins with a prologue about Rwanda.

Prologue: A Farmer
by: Bill Berkeley

"I killed because I was forced to," said that man in the dirty white shirt, his face knotted with anxiety, eyes averted. "I either had to do it or I would die myself. Many were killed for refusing to kill."

His name was François-Xavier Sibomana, forty-seven years old and balding. he had thin wrists and knobby, callused fingers. He was talking about the murder of his brother-in-law, Isaac Kimonyo.

"I did not kill him single-handedly," he explained. "We would converge on a person. We killed a number of people, but jointly." In his own village they killed nine people, he said. He used a machete; others used clubs. "I knew some of them personally. They were neighbors."

But his own brother-in-law?

"He did not deserve to die. He was an old man."

François rubbed his hands on his worn gray cotton trousers, crudely repaired with black stitches at the crotch. He brushed the ground with his blue canvas sneakers, with no laces, no socks. "We killed him in his house," he continued. "He was dragged from the bedroom and killed in the sitting room. Emmanuel struck him first. He was the leader of the militia. I could not do it myself. For me, I stood by and watched. There was nothing I could do."

Nothing he could do?

"I made no effort to stop the killers because we were led by the leader of the militia," François insisted. "So nobody would dare to ask to spare the man."

François Sibomana had spent most of his life cultivating sorghum and sweet potatoes on the steep mountain slopes of Kibungo Prefecture in eastern Rwanda. He said he had never killed before. He had a wife and eight children, though he didn't know where they were. He was now in captivity - an admitted member of the Interhamwe militia, "those who attack together," the Hutu death squads that had stabbed, clubbed and hacked to death up to a half million Rwandans, mostly ethnic Tutsis, in the weeks just prior to our meeting.

"Everybody had to join," François told me. "It was the thing to do."

We were sitting in a vacant lot in a rubble-strewn, rebel-held town called Kabuga, on the outskirts of Kigali, the Rwandan capital. It was June 1994. Rwanda's genocide was still unfolding in the south. Hundreds of dazed survivors of the massacres, some of them wrapped in gauze that barely concealed their hideous machete wounds, loitered amid the wreckage of their lives in the looted and gutted ruins nearby.

From a crackling transistor radio behind me I could hear Radio-Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (A Thousand Hills Free Radio-Television), the state-allied broadcasting arm. "Defend your rights and rise up!" a voice on the radio was singing. There were drums and guitars in the background. A popular crooner named Simon Bikindi was beseeching his fellow Hutus - the bene sebahinzi, the sons of cultivators - to carry on the slaughter without delay. "Defend your rights and rise up against those who want to oppress you!" The drumming and strumming had an oddly intimate effect. Bikindi was singing in riddles, addressing mbira abumva, "those who can understand." His voice was soft, gently cadenced, almost lyrical. He was warning his listeners of the malign intentions of the bene sebatunzi, the sons of pastoralists - the Tutsis. "The Tutsi are ferocious beasts, the most vicious hyenas, more cunning than the rhino," he cooed. "The Tusi inyenzi" - cockroaches - "are bloodthirsty murderers. They dissect their victims, extracting vital organs, the heart, liver and stomach."

In the days leading up to my meeting with François, I had visited a plain brick church by a dirt road south of Kigali that was filled waist-high with about two hundred putrid, maggot-riddled, freshly slaughtered corpses. Later I met a wide-eyed eleven-year-old girl named Umulisa, dressed in a threadbare blue and red sweater, with smudged cheeks and a luminous smile. Umulisa had laughed at me hysterically, irrepressibly, rather than tell me in her own words about the day two weeks earlier when she fled from her home as the militia arrived, then returned an hour later and discovered her mother and father, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles in a heap of severed heads and arms and legs on the floor of her living room.

The previous evening, in an abandoned store less than a block from the lot in which François and I were talking, I had met a middle-aged gentleman named Isadore, who had survived with his wife and children but lost twenty immediate relatives. Isadore had stared at me with tired, quizzical eyes. "I was very much surprised," he said. "Looking at my neighbors, I thought they were friends. I was very much surprised that they were among the people who came to try to kill us."

As I sat now with François in that vacant lot in Kabuga, the old familiar questions were running through my mind, from another part of the world, a half century earlier: How was such a horror possible? How could ordinary men like this one - a farmer, middle-aged, the father of eight - participate in a monstrous crime? What malignant blend of bigotry and fear, coercion or cowardice, history, politics, poverty and ignorance, envy, opportunism, unquestioning obedience, peer pressure perhaps - what brought out the shark in this man?

I looked into François' eyes. He seemed bewildered by my questions. All he said was this: "The message from the top was passed down to the local village chiefs, the conseillers. The conseillers had lists of Tutsis who should be killed. They simply organized their constituents."

He kicked a pebble and stared into the middle distance.

"The leaders of the party and the leaders of the militia rounded up all the men in the village. We were told that we had a mission. We were given a list of people to kill. If we met someone on the list, they would be killed."

Context of the genocide

I don't usually like to post things that are very lengthy, but tonight I came across an article that was published in the Virginia Quarterly Review a couple years ago that I think does an excellent job of addressing the context of the Rwandan genocide - within the history of genocide and genocide ideology, within the international community and within Rwanda. Since I will probably make several more posts about the genocide during this week of commemoration, I decided to post this piece as additional background and information for those of you who may be less familiar with the events that took place here. I hope some of you have a few minutes to read it.

Genocide in Rwanda
by: Jack R. Fischel

It is more than sixty years since the end of World War II, when the world became aware of the Holocaust, the Third Reich’s conscious decision to murder every Jewish man, woman, and child in German-occupied Europe. The Nazi state-sponsored murder of six million Jews was subsequently labeled genocide, a term unknown before the war, but first used by Raphael Lemkin in his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, Laws of Occupation-Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress, published in the United States in 1944. A Jewish refugee who fled Warsaw when Nazi Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Lemkin eventually made his way to the United States, where he taught law at Yale University, and subsequently contributed to the passage of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in December 1948. Lemkin had faith that the implementation of the genocide convention would “never again” allow a state to murder a people as was the case with Hitler’s “Final Solution.” In time, the Holocaust emerged as the paradigm case of genocide, whereby all future instances of state-directed mass murder would be measured against the Nazi annihilation of the Jews.

In addition to the passage of the genocide convention, the United Nations General Assembly also created a vehicle for enforcing the law when it established an International Court of Justice (ICJ), for the purpose of prosecuting the perpetrators of genocide. It was not until October 1988, however, that the United States Senate passed the Genocide Convention Implementation Act, which made genocide punishable in the United States. The law, however, included a reservation which stipulated that if the United States was accused of genocide, the president would have to consent before it would be a party before the International Court of Justice. The practical, if not legal, consequence of this reservation meant that if the United States produced evidence that a state was committing genocide, and attempted to bring the perpetrators before the ICJ, the accused country could assert the American reservation under the doctrine of reciprocity. The practical result of this reservation, therefore, was that the United States was effectively blocked from ever filing charges in the court against states perpetrating genocide.

Legalities aside, as Samantha Power, the executive director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, notes in A Problem from Hell, abiding by a UN resolution to commit American troops, as part of an international force to intervene in behalf of the victims of genocide, has always been a politically unpopular option. Power cites a State Department official who stated, in responding to mass murder in Burundi, when the ruling Tutsis hunted down and killed between 100,000 and 150,000 Hutus, “Do you know of any official whose career had been advanced because he spoke out for human rights?” Furthermore, the “Realists” in the foreign policy establishment promoted the policy that the United States has a vital national interest before committing troops to prevent genocide. Short of citing the national interest, the use of the American military to protect helpless victims of genocide has rarely resonated with the American public. This was the case during the Holocaust, when the United States abandoned European Jews to Nazi extermination, and it was true in regard to the Clinton administration’s response to the genocide in Rwanda.

Philip Gourevitch, now the editor of The Paris Review, but a journalist when he wrote his riveting account of the genocide in Rwanda, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, notes that “the dead of Rwanda accumulated at nearly three times the rate of Jewish dead during the Holocaust. It was the most efficient mass killing since the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” Like the Nazis, who believed in the creation of an Aryan utopia which necessitated the destruction of the Jewish people, the Hutu-led government of Rwanda imagined that by exterminating the Tutsi people they could create a better world. Both genocides were predicated on pseudo-racial assumptions that resulted in mass murder.

Although there are those who argue that the Hutus are Bantu and the Tutsis a Nilotic people, Gourevitch insists there is little documentary evidence to support this belief. More importantly, both people spoke the same language, followed the same religion, intermarried, and shared a common existence without making distinctions along the line of ethnicity, that is, until the Europeans arrived in Central Africa.

Much as Houston Stewart Chamberlain served as an ideological link between nineteenth-century racist theory and Nazi anti-Semitism, John Hanning Speke, an Englishman, fostered a theory that more than a hundred years later would contribute to genocide in Rwanda. It was Speke who in 1863 set forth the Hamitic myth which claimed that all culture and civilization in Central Africa had been introduced by the taller, sharp-featured people whom he claimed were a Caucasoid tribe of Ethiopian origin, descended from King David. In Rwanda, the Tutsis were so identified, a superior race to the inferior Hutu Negroids. The Hutus, it was believed, were descendant from the biblical Ham. According to the Bible, Noah learned that his youngest son, Ham, had seen him naked, and subsequently told his brothers, Shem and Japheth, what he had observed. Noah responded by cursing Ham’s son, Canaan, and his progeny with the ill-fated words, “A slave of slaves shall he be to his brothers.” This biblical curse, which was used to justify the enslavement of Africans in the American colonies, was also applied to the Hutus, whom the Europeans designated to serve the Tutsis. Gourevitch notes that:

Few living Rwandans have heard of John Hanning Speke, but most know the essence of his wild fantasy—that the Africans who best resembled the tribes of Europe were inherently endowed with mastery—and whether they accept or reject it, few Rwandans would deny that the Hamitic myth is one of the essential ideas by which they understand who they are in the world.

Despite the Hutu monopoly on power which followed Rwanda’s independence in 1962, the Hamitic myth became the basis of state ideology. Gourevitch states that the myth was so deeply ingrained that an “almost mystical sense of inferiority persisted among Rwanda’s Hutu elite.” In November 1992, for example, the Hutu ideologue, Leon Mugesera called on Hutus to send the Tutsis back to Ethiopia.

When the Belgians replaced the Germans as the colonial masters in Rwanda after World War I, they elevated the Tutsi to positions of power over the majority Hutu population. The Belgians bestowed this authority on the Tutsis because of stereotypes about Rwandans which framed a picture of the Tutsi as a race of warrior kings, surrounded by the subordinate race of Hutu peasants. During the genocide which commenced in April 1994, the European legacy, which synthesized the Hamitic myth with the perceived distinctive physical characteristics between both groups, came home to roost when the bodily appearance of the Tutsi became a death sentence. The archetype Hutu physiology was mainly stocky and round-faced, dark-skinned, flat nosed, with thick lips and a square jaw. The Tutsis were lanky and long-faced, light-skinned, with narrow noses and narrow chins. Because of frequent intermarriage, however, over time there were numerous exceptions to the physical stereotypes of both groups.

The modern history of Rwanda began in 1921 when it and Burundi, formerly part of German East Africa, were placed under a League of Nations mandate which was awarded to Belgium. Although a minority of the population under the Belgians, the Tutsis became a privileged class, and asserted their political and social superiority over the majority Hutu population. In 1931, Belgium introduced identity cards which specified the ethnic group of the bearer, a policy that continued until 1994. The introduction of the identity cards marked a symbolic turning point in the subsequent history of Rwanda. As Gourevitch writes, “whatever Hutu and Tutsi identity may have meant in the pre-colonial state, the Belgians had made ‘ethnicity’ the defining feature of Rwandan existence.” The Belgians had introduced the race card and subsequently, Gourevitch informs us, every schoolchild was reared in the doctrine of racial superiority and inferiority, which led to a steady erosion of a common national identity. In its place there arose a culture of mutually exclusionary discourse based on competing claims of entitlement and injury. Rwanda became a UN trust territory in 1946 and was administered as a Belgian colony, but when the last Tutsi king, Mutara Rudahigwa, died in 1959, his death was followed by massacres perpetrated by Hutu peasants against their Tutsi overlords, leading to the exodus of hundreds of thousands of Tutsis. Soon after Rwanda declared its independence in 1962, the Hutu-led Rwandan army carried out the first wide-spread massacre of Tutsis, and continued to periodically launch assaults against them for the next decade. In 1978, Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu, was elected President of Rwanda. Under his leadership, the persecution of Tutsis continued until 1990, when the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) was organized from Tutsi militias operating in Tanzania, Uganda, Burundi, and Zaire, thus igniting a civil war which resulted in Tutsi victories in different parts of Rwanda. President Habyarimana responded by stoking the anger of the Hutu population towards the Tutsis, and, in the months preceding the genocide, promoted the incendiary slogan of “Hutu Power.” This battle cry became the motto of the interahamwe, a cadre of young Hutu extremist gangs created by the government to foster violence against Rwanda’s Tutsi population. The fighting between both the Tutsis and the Hutus eventually culminated in negotiations between the RPF and the Habyarimana government. The subsequent Arusha Peace Agreement in Tanzania (August 1993), which ended the civil war, commenced a peace process with the objective of creating a political voice for the Tutsis in Rwanda. Hardliners in the Hutu leadership, however, opposed the Arusha accords, which precipitated Habyarimana’s assassination on April 6, 1994, when his plane was shot down by a mysterious missile, thus setting the stage for the genocide.

The new militant Hutu leadership set in motion the organized unemployed interahamwe gangs to massacre Tutsis. Armed mostly with machetes, the interahamwe was joined by many in the Hutu population who shouted the refrain “Hutu Power,” as they engaged in a killing spree that was unprecedented in its ferocity. That the resulting genocide, which culminated in the murder of 800,000 Tutsi men, women, and children, was preventable is the argument made in Shake Hands with the Devil by Lt. General Roméo Dallaire, who served the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR 1) as its Force Commander during the genocide. General Dallaire was appointed by the United Nations to lead a contingent of peace-keepers to monitor the implementation of the Arusha Peace Agreement. The authors discussed in this essay attest to Dallaire’s valiant efforts to head off the evolving genocide, but he found himself frustrated by the United Nations’ reluctance to provide him with the necessary military personnel and logistic support that would have prevented the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives.

The mass-murders were provoked by radio broadcasts, which referred to the Tutsis as inyenzi or “cockroaches,” much as Nazi propaganda referred to the Jews as “parasites.” Dallaire notes that Rwanda is a radio-based culture in which broadcasts were “akin to the voice of God, and if the radio called for violence, many Rwandans would respond, believing they were being sanctioned to commit these actions.”

Dallaire’s tone describes the unfolding genocide in detail, a murderous frenzy in which children were brutally killed, pregnant women had their fetuses ripped from their womb as they were murdered, and where the churches were defiled by the massacre of the Tutsis who sought refuge only to find that the Hutu priests, in this mostly Catholic country, betrayed them to the killers. With his undermanned force, Dallaire was helpless to prevent the bloodshed. Dallaire laments the fact that had the UN given him permission to act, he could have prevented much of the carnage. Instead, the UN ordered him not to intervene, not even to intercept caches of machetes that were subsequently used in the genocide. In addition to his graphic account of the atrocities, Dallaire’s indispensable record is also a scathing indictment of the advanced industrialized world in general, and the United States in particular, in its reaction to the unfolding genocide. Dallaire argues that because of casualties the United States suffered in Somalia, the Clinton administration was reluctant to support UN intervention in Rwanda, lest it be forced to send troops to stop the genocide. This condemnation of the Clinton administration is echoed by Samantha Power who writes:

When the massacres started, not only did the Clinton administration not send troops to Rwanda to contest the slaughter, but refused countless other options. President Clinton did not convene a single meeting of his senior foreign policy advisors to discuss U.S. options for Rwanda. His top aides rarely condemned the slaughter. The United States did not deploy its technical assets to jam Rwandan hate radio, and it did not lobby to have genocidal Rwandan government’s ambassador expelled from the United Nations. Those steps that the United States did take had deadly repercussions. Washington demanded the withdrawal of UN peacekeepers from Rwanda.

Dallaire contends that there were politically pragmatic reasons why the United States and other industrialized countries did not support intervention in Rwanda.

When it comes to genocidal conflict, states Dallaire, the criteria for intervention is whether the country has any possible strategic value to the world powers. If so, “then it seems that everything from covert operations to the outright use of overwhelming force is fair game. If it is not, indifference is the order of the day.” Rwanda, a poor nation located in Central Africa, had absolutely no value to the developed world, which resulted in a reluctance to invest financially in intervention or risk the possibility of suffering casualties. The absence of a vital national interest trumped any humanitarian consideration that might have stopped the genocide. Dallaire divulges that “an American officer felt no shame as he informed me that the lives of 800,000 Rwandans were only worth risking the lives of ten American troops.” Gourevitch similarly reports the response of an American military officer who stated that in regard to Rwanda, “genocide had about as much emotional impact as the words ‘cheese sandwich.’” Writing with great passion, Dallaire ponders the question, “are we all human, or are some more human than others?” Dallaire concludes that the failure to prevent genocide in Rwanda suggests that many in the developed world consider their lives worth more than those of other citizens on the planet. But for those who believe that the world shares a common humanity, “then we must be prepared to move beyond national self-interest to spend our resources and spill our blood to prevent future genocide.”

In the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide, when the Tutsi RPF emerged victorious in the struggle against the hard-line Rwandan government, millions of Hutus fled the country, finding sanctuary in Goma, across the border in Zaire. The international community, including the United States, responded to this exodus of almost two million Hutus, by establishing refugee camps in Goma. The refugees, however, also included the remnants of the defeated Hutu military, and an even greater number of interahamwe militia, the main perpetrators of the genocide. The refugee camps were established and administered by the United Nations and non-government relief organizations, which included American representation. Aside from feeding and clothing the refugees, the United Nations primary objective was to repatriate the evacuees back to Rwanda as soon as possible. But the unrepentant Hutu perpetrators, who blended in with the refugee population, began killing camp inmates so as to intimidate them to renew the battle against the Tutsis. To complicate this already tense situation the RPF, whose ranks included many soldiers whose families had been murdered by the Hutus, knew who the killers were and cordoned off the camps. Under these circumstances, it was inevitable that fighting would erupt between the RPF and the remnants of the Hutu military. This aspect of the Rwandan tragedy is told in Journey Into Darkness by Thomas P. Odom, an American intelligence officer, who served as the United States attache in Zaire in the immediate aftermath of the genocide.

Like Power and Dallaire, Odom is critical of America’s role in the unfolding genocide, accusing the Clinton administration of moving at glacial speed, first in recognizing that genocide was taking place, and then the timeliness of its response to the outfitting of UNAMIR 2, whose mission was to contribute to the security and protection of displaced persons, refugees, and civilians at risk in Rwanda. By the time the UNAMIR 2 force was equipped to halt the killings, however, the genocide and the war was largely over. Subsequently, the United States, through Operation Support Hope, participated within the framework of the United Nations to play a role in efforts to solve the refugee crisis in the aftermath of the genocide. Odom argues, however, that although the objective to halt the killings between the RPF and the Hutus was achievable, the effort to return the refugees to Rwanda was an unrealistic one. Odom writes:

There was no way the United States, the international community, or any combination of forces was going to force two million Rwandan refugees to pick up and go home. They had just slaughtered eight hundred thousand of their neighbors. They believed an equally bloodthirsty army was waiting for them across the border. They had just marched one hundred miles or more to escape that army, suffering at least seventy thousand dead.

Caught between their fear of the RPF and the armed Hutu military, and interahamwe, the refugees had little choice but to follow the dictates of the latter. Furthermore, as long as the Hutu hardliners were armed, there was little chance that a return of the refugees to Rwanda could be accomplished without further bloodshed. After the humiliating setback in Somalia, the Clinton administration saw no political capital in attempting to disarm the Hutus.

Looking back at the events in Rwanda, Odom concludes that by 1995, a year after the genocide, the United States still did not have a clear policy in Rwanda. The Clinton administration, states Odom, remained reactive to events. The United States sought to end the killings and bring about stability by reducing external threats:

We believed if we did not work toward that aim, the new government in Rwanda was bound to strike out at its external enemies and grow increasingly harder on its internal foes. Regional conflict was on the horizon…if we did not move quickly enough…Rwanda would take most of Central Africa with it into war.

In late 1996, the RPF moved into Zaire and closed the refugee camps, which included the disarming of 110,000 armed Hutus. For the most part, the Hutus were repatriated and those identified as having participated in the genocide were imprisoned. When instability in the region continued, the Rwandan government created an allied army of Tutsi exiles in Zaire and ultimately conquered the country. Odom notes that the Rwandan action in Zaire led to an expanded ongoing war. Zaire, renamed the Congo, was the scene of an uneasy peace and periodic fighting between Uganda, Zimbabwe, Zambia, the Congo, and Rwanda. Odom estimates that as of 2005 the casualties in this “African World War,” exceeded three million.

Unlike the books discussed above, Jean Hatzfield’s Machete Season takes a different perspective on the Rwandan genocide. His important work seeks to understand how the perpetrators rationalized their participation in cold-blooded mass murder. Following the return of the Hutu refugees to Rwanda, the Tutsi government adopted a special genocide code to deal with the perpetrators. Although all of the perpetrators were liable for the death penalty, the genocide code limited executions only to those who planned, organized, supervised, and instigated mass murder, as well as to those who participated in sexual torture. For those perpetrators who followed government orders to kill, the maximum penalty was life imprisonment, or a reduced sentence if a guilty plea or a valid confession was forthcoming.

Hatzfeld interviewed ten men who were part of a gang that were heavily involved in the killings and were now imprisoned in a Rwandan jail for their role in the genocide. It was the author’s objective to glean from these killers the motivation behind their participation in mass murder. Hatzfeld, a journalist based in Paris, notes that he was drawn to write about mass murder in Rwanda because of its similarity to the Holocaust. He discovered that in both genocides there were similar patterns of behavior, whereby the decision to kill was the result of government indoctrination and preparations formulated and implemented by orders passed down by legitimate state authority. The precondition for mobilizing both Germans and Hutus to annihilate their targeted victims required that the government inundate the perpetrators with propaganda that declared Jews and Tutsis to be subhuman, thus making it easier for the killers to rationalize murder. As one of the Rwandan perpetrators informs Hatzfeld, “we no longer saw human beings when we turned up a Tutsi…savagery took over the mind.”

Hatzfeld’s study makes an important contribution to our understanding of the darker impulses of humanity which, under certain conditions, can undermine the fragile line between civilization and barbarity. This was true in Rwanda as it was in Nazi Germany, and we are witnessing this breakdown in Dafur. In his interviews with the Rwandan perpetrators, Hatzfeld’s work echoes a similar type of investigation found in Christopher Browning’s influential Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (HarperCollins, 1992). Browning’s indispensable work on the Holocaust examined the reaction of a battalion of German Order Police, numbering 500 men, who in July 1942 rounded up 1,800 Jews in the Polish village of Jozefow and shot some 1,500 women, children, and elderly people. Browning discovered that many of these overage reserve policemen were neither committed Nazis nor virulent anti-Semites. Within sixteen months, however, these “ordinary men” participated in the direct shooting deaths of at least 38,000 Jews and the deportation of an additional 45,000 to the Treblinka death camp. Based on postwar interrogation records, Browning recorded what they did, what they thought, and how they rationalized their behavior. Hatzfeld notes the reluctance of those motivated by anti-Semitism among Browning’s police reservists to acknowledge that the hatred of Jews was driving them to kill at the time. Hatzfeld likens Browning’s “ordinary men” to some of the Hutus he interviewed who were also reluctant to admit their anti-Tutsi feelings, inasmuch as the author was told that “the Hutu infant was swaddled with hatred for the Tutsis before opening his eyes to the world.” He found that the perpetrators were more reticent about their feelings towards their victims than they were about their first murders, and Hatzfeld concludes that the Rwandan perpetrators may have used this as a tactic to exonerate themselves by insisting that they killed because they were brainwashed, a phenomena found in the literature surrounding the interrogation of Nazis after the war about their participation in the killing of Jews.

Hatzfeld discovered that the hatred of the victim was not the only motivation for many of the Hutu perpetrators to participate in the mass murder. One Hutu interviewed was happily married to a Tutsi, and harbored no anti-Tutsi feelings at the beginning of the genocide. Another was only interested in playing soccer, never caring at all about anti-Tutsiism, until he got caught up in the massacres. Even the leader of the interahamwe, Joseph-Desire Bitero, was not rabidly anti-Tutsi until the last few months before the massacres. From his interviews, Hatzfeld concludes that:

This tends to prove that if anti-Tutiism was a driving force of the genocide, helping to push it into criminal reality, the bigotry was only one motive of many and not sufficient on its own to explain everyone’s actions and attitudes…Although they are not disturbed by the killings, they often seemed befuddled and overwhelmed by them. Ignace, for example, one of the most vicious Tutsi-haters and certainly one of the most anti-Tutsi in the gang, is one of those who swung his machete the least…They dread facing the consequences of the genocide…More important they are afraid to learn the reasons and motives behind the upheaval and see no point in trying to understand it.

A conclusion not unlike the one that Browning found among the members of the police battalion. From Hatzfeld’s interviews there emerge a number of reasons why “ordinary” Hutus perpetrated genocide, least of which was that some of the killers enjoyed it. As one of the gang explained, “the more we saw people die, the less we thought about their lives…and the more we got used to enjoying it.” Some were fascinated by the process of killing. One Hutu revealed to Hatzfeld that he had killed two children and found that “it was strange to see the children drop without a sound. It was almost pleasantly easy.” Compare this testimony to that of a member of the German police battalion who would shoot only infants and children, to “release” them from their misery. Still another informs Hatzfeld that “killing is very discouraging if you yourself must decide to do it…but if you must obey the orders of the authorities…if you see that the killing will be total and without consequences for yourself, you feel soothed and reassured. You go off to it with no more worry.” Then there was the matter of the competition for limited land resources. A Hutu reveals that he killed the Tutsis because there was not enough land for the two ethnic groups, and since neither would leave, it was up to the Hutus to solve the problem. This rationale for killing was reinforced when another of the gang told Hatzfeld that hatred flourished in the fields because the plots of land were not large enough for the two ethnic groups.

Profiting from the murder of the Tutsis was also a factor that played a role in the genocide. As was the situation in Nazi Germany, when the government “Aryanized” Jewish property, Hutus benefitted from the removal of the Tutsis. As the author was told, when you receive firm orders, and promises of long-term benefits, “the wickedness of killing until your arm falls off is gone to you.” The wives of the perpetrators fanned the zeal of their husbands to kill Tutsis, as they weighed the loot and the promise of spoils from the victims.

Although there are differences when one compares the Holocaust to the genocide in Rwanda, there are also striking similarities. Hatzfeld notes that in Germany the intention was to purify being and thought by eliminating the Jews, who were found guilty of fostering a degenerating influence on the nation. In rural Rwanda, the intent of the genocide was to purify the earth, to cleanse it of its cockroaches and snakes, the Tutsis. Whereas the Holocaust was the product of an industrial society using the methods of technology to murder its victims, the Rwandan genocide was the product of an agricultural people, whose weapon of choice was the machete. Nevertheless, as Hatzfeld notes, despite archaic weapons, the Hutus, in terms of killing efficiency, proved to be more effective than the Nazis in murdering the Jews and Gypsies. Hatzfeld points out that some 800,000 Tutsis were killed in twelve weeks; whereas, at the height of the shootings and deportations in 1942, the Nazi regime, equipped with its weapons of mass destruction, such as carbon monoxide, Zyklon B, and heavy machine guns, never attained so murderous a result anywhere in Germany or its fifteen occupied countries.

Both the Holocaust and the Rwanda genocide were implemented in the midst of war. Hatzfeld notes that war is neither the cause or consequence of genocide, but that the mass murder of innocent victims occurs because war suspends the rule of law, “it systematizes death, normalizes savagery, fosters fear, . . . reawakens old demons and unsettles morality and human values.” As one Rwandan summed it up for Hatzfeld, “war is a dreadful disorder in which the culprits of genocide can plot incognito,” yet another confirmation why genocide continues to be “the problem from hell . . . ” Since the Holocaust, the international community has witnessed the outbreak of genocide, or mass murder that approximates it, in Bosnia, Cambodia, Kosovo, Rwanda, Srebrenica, in Saddam Hussein’s use of poison gas against the Kurds, and now in Darfur. Ironically, as Samantha Power informs us, the industrialized nations that use the absence of a vital national interest to avoid intervention in behalf of the victims of genocide have also invoked the Holocaust to justify inaction. Because the Holocaust is the model for measuring the perpetration of state-generated genocide, intercession is avoided if it does not totally measure up to the Nazi extermination of the Jews. Power cites the reaction of US Assistant Secretary of State Richard Murphy to Saddam’s use of chemical warfare against the Kurds to illustrate her point. Murphy refused to acknowledge Saddam’s murder of the Kurds as an act of genocide because, “it was clear to me that Saddam had no intention of exterminating ‘all’ Kurds.” Power notes that Murphy “had never read the genocide convention and thus equated genocide with Hitler’s holistic campaign to wipe out every last Jew in Europe.”

The Bush administration has acknowledged that the atrocities in Darfur are acts of genocide, but has proceeded to do little to halt it. Once again, the industrialized world is faced with the opportunity to prevent the murder of tens of thousands, and once again reasons are found to delay intervention until it is too late, as was the response to the Holocaust and the genocide in Rwanda, although the latter so closely paralleled the former. Based on its record, Lemkin’s faith in the United Nations to prevent another Holocaust may have been misplaced, and the international community’s failure to respond to genocide forces us to ponder Samantha Power’s somewhat cynical but, nevertheless, insightful assessment of the UN genocide convention when she writes, that in practice it means “never again would the Germans kill Jews in Europe in the 1940s.”