 "Photo: Courtesy of Diana Bisengo")
Editors’ note: This is the first installment in a two-part series about the Rwandan genocide and the experiences of one of its victims.
Diana Bisengo watched her father get murdered in front of her eyes. She lost two of her brothers and was tortured for months by a house full of strangers before she managed to escape her home country of Rwanda, located in central Africa, and move to the United States.
There has been tension in Rwanda between two ethnic groups, the Hutus and the Tutsis, for years. Bisengo, a Tutsi, says Hutu extremist leaders wanted to eliminate all Tutsis so Hutus could take over the country. Her family could tell the genocide was coming — her mother fled the country a few years before the mass violence broke out, but her father was passionate about living and dying in the country in which he was born.
Hate speeches were broadcast on the radio for several weeks preceding the genocide. Tutsis were called cockroaches, and Hutus were ordered to rise up and eradicate them from the earth. On April 6, 1994, the tension finally erupted when the plane of Juvenal Habyarimana, the president of Rwanda and a Hutu, was shot down. Both Hutu and Tutsi extremist groups were blamed, but no one ever claimed responsibility for the shooting. The night Habyarimana died, mass murders of Tutsis, and anyone found helping Tutsis, began. In the 100 days that followed, an estimated 800,000 people were killed.
Caught in the violence
Bisengo, 21, is now a junior at Salisbury University and at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore with a double major in social work and sociology. She was only 6 years old when the genocide happened.
She says the most disturbing thing about this story is how victims were killed.
“They could just shoot you or stab you,” Bisengo says. “No. This time they would slowly, slowly kill you, they would make you feel the pain. They would chop your fingers one by one, they would chop your legs piece by piece until you beg for mercy and you’d grab the knife from them and stab yourself, or you’d die slowly right there.”
When the president’s plane was shot down, Bisengo says, her father knew it was time to move. She fled with her father and two brothers from their home in Kigali, Rwanda’s capital. They traveled on foot from city to city, trying to find safety. Almost every means of transportation was being watched by the Hutu militia, the Interahamwe.
“The bodies of people who died before that day, the Hutus used the bodies as like a road block, so you couldn’t drive your car, you couldn’t take a boat and go somewhere, you couldn’t go to the airport,” she says.
They made their way to the house of her father’s best friend. He was a Hutu, but told the Bisengos they would be protected. Her family stayed for one night. The next day, Bisengo says, her father went out. While he was gone, his best friend called other Hutus and told them there were Tutsis in his house.
“When they came my older brother, Eric, ran away because he was old enough. He knew exactly what was going on,” she says. “But as far as me and my younger brother, we didn’t know what was going on, we stayed with my dad.”
She says she watched as her father got into an argument with his best friend, asking him how he could betray the family. Her father offered the dozen or so men money so his family could be set free, but the men refused.
Bisengo’s father’s best friend came up to her younger brother and hit him over the head with a shovel, beating him to the ground. He then went over to Bisengo and did the same. She says she was knocked unconscious but could still see what was happening. She watched helplessly as her father was stabbed to death.
After her father died, she woke up to find her younger brother was gone.
“Here I am laying down trying to figure out what had happened. I was left alone and I didn’t know where to go,” Bisengo says. “As soon as I woke up I started running as far away from the body as possible, and then I see the man who just killed my father and he’s running after me.”
Luckily, she says, she was able to outrun him. She kept running through the surrounding forest where she found her older brother, Eric. They got into an argument about where to go and ended up parting ways — it was the last time she ever saw him. Even today, she hasn’t heard any news about what happened to him, or if he is alive or dead.
Bisengo continued running, and says the next thing she knew, she was laying on the ground.
“The first thing I saw when I woke up was this woman, and her neck was hanging loose, you know, like those bobble heads. Her head was just about to fall off because someone had cut her neck,” she says.
A man dressed in army clothes woke her up. He took Bisengo, the woman with the injured neck and one other woman back to his home where his mother, father and siblings lived.
The women and Bisengo stayed in the attic for several days, where the new environment, she says, irritated her nose and caused her to sneeze and cough. The other women in the attic nearly suffocated her as they tried to cover her mouth to keep her from making a sound.
They were all in danger, Bisengo says, because Hutus kept searching the house trying to find them after one of the neighbors had revealed the man was hiding Tutsis. The Hutus kept hunting but found nothing — they didn’t know there was an attic in the house. After several more days, the man’s father and mother realized it was going to be too risky to keep Tutsis in their home any longer. They decided to let the older women go, but kept Bisengo since she was still just a child.
She stayed with the family for several months until the genocide was over. Though the family essentially helped to save her life, Bisengo says she was horribly mistreated during her time with them.
“They abused me, stabbed me, burned my body, nearly killed me. I was basically left there to die, and I never understood why they took me in even though they starved me to death half the time,” Bisengo says. “Their daughter always hit me, burned me; she would put on a knife and heat it up and then stab me with it. And then the boys of the house, they would do whatever they wanted to do as far as beating, raping. Any possible thing you can do to a person that family did to me.”
An old woman who lived in the same neighborhood found out she was being kept in the house and she was alive, Bisengo says. The woman happened to be married to Bisengo’s uncle, and she began working to free her from her captors. She succeeded, and then contacted Bisengo’s mother in the United States.
Bisengo says when her mother heard she was alive, she processed papers and raised money to bring her to the United States. Bisengo was sent from Rwanda to Kenya, where she stayed with a family for a short time. In 1996, she was sent to the United States and has lived here for the past 13 years.
“Ever since then I’ve been trying to find a way to cope with it and move on with my life,” Bisengo says.
Cause and effect
Timothy Longman is a professor and director of the African Studies Center at Boston University. From 1995 to 1996, he worked for the Human Rights Watch in Rwanda, where he did research for a 900-page dissertation about the genocide and its roots.
The country of Rwanda has three ethnic groups. The largest is the Hutus, followed by the Tutsis, then the Twa. Longman says there was much distortion of identity between the ethnic groups during the colonial period. The Belgians, who were colonizing Rwanda, believed the Tutsis looked slightly more European than the other groups and were therefore closer to being a superior race. When the Belgians left, they placed the Tutsis in positions of power so they could rule the country.
Ethnic battles for power in Rwanda continued between the Tutsis and the Hutus. Much later, in the 1990s, government power had shifted primarily to Hutus, who began losing support and resorted to ethnic scapegoating. A multi-party transitional government was created, but ethnic violence continued. The government pushed forward some political reform, Longman says, but at the same time they resisted political reform by encouraging ethnic hatred. Massacres took place periodically.
“It was an organized event that took place from the top, it wasn’t spontaneous violence,” Longman says. “It also wasn’t really as much popular violence as people make it out to be, really it was a sort of core group of people that did most of the killing because they were really organized by the central government. So a lot of what happened is really explained by the power of the state if it’s a very centralized state.”
He says the main reason people participated in the killing was fear.
“A lot of people who don’t understand the Rwandan genocide very well think it was motivated by hatred and that’s inaccurate,” he says.
Most people, Longman says, participated because they were scared, confused and manipulated by the government.
The government controlled all sources of information, and told its Hutu citizens that Tutsis were attacking the country, causing some of the Hutus to believe they were acting in self-defense by killing. They were also afraid of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, a minority group of Tutsi soldiers working to regain power in the country. Lastly, Hutus were afraid of being killed as traitors if they did not participate in the mass killing of Tutsis.
“The people who are in charge of maintaining security in society, the people in charge of maintaining order, are telling you to kill your neighbors and they’re telling you that if you don’t you can be punished,” Longman says. “So it isn’t just that people are rising up and killing their neighbors, it’s rather that they were ordered to do so by the people who are powerful.”
Andrew Rice has spent several years living in Uganda, the country bordering Rwanda to the north, where he worked with the Institute of Current World Affairs. He has also written about Africa for several publications, including “The New York Times Magazine” and “The Economist.”
He says the countries have strong common ties, and each has experienced extreme violence. However, Rwanda and Uganda have taken different steps toward reconciliation after violence.
“What you really see with Rwanda and Uganda is two different models at work, one of which is the forgive and forget model and the other one, in Rwanda, which is much more about commemorating atrocities, remembering the atrocities, and trying to hold people accountable,” Rice says. “Even if the punishments aren’t necessarily huge that they’re weeding out, they’re still trying to assign accountability.”
Uganda, he says, has offered amnesty for perpetrators of the country’s extreme violence during the military rule of Idi Amin. An estimated 300,000 people were killed while his regime was in power, according to the BBC World News.
In Rwanda, there has been much more of an emphasis on trying people accused of genocide crimes, Rice says. There are smaller, local trials for most of the accused. There is a larger international criminal tribunal for Rwanda, based in Tanzania, which tries those in charge of planning the genocide.
He says it is too soon to tell which model will be most effective in restoring stability in the countries. In Uganda there has not yet been a renewed outbreak of violence, but many who lost friends and family members are still unsatisfied with the reconciliation that was forced upon them.
In Rwanda’s case, he says, some people argue that the victors dole out punishments, perpetuating a circle of violence and tension.
Longman says the most disappointing thing about the Rwandan genocide is people seem to think it was unavoidable.
“It was never inevitable. It’s not that there was something wrong with the Rwanda psyche. The fact is, it could have been stopped,” Longman says. “It was so predictable, it was something that we saw coming and those of us who were there tried to warn the world and unfortunately they didn’t do anything.”
Next week: Diana Bisengo talks about how the genocide affected her and her return trip to Rwanda this year.
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