When genocide becomes personal: One girl’s story of horror and escape

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.