When genocide becomes personal: Years later, dealing with the aftermath of a crisis

Editor’s Note: This is Part Two of a story printed last week about the a victim of the Rwandan genocide.   

Diana Bisengo managed to survive the brutally violent Rwandan genocide. She escaped the hacking of machetes, but also lived to see her family killed around her. When she came to the United States, she was a severely traumatized 7-year-old child.

“Of course I’ve been very affected by the situation,” Bisengo says. “When I came to this country I just felt like there was no point in me living. I had no hopes for tomorrow.”

Her troubled mind made her violent toward her fellow students and even her mother. Sometimes when they would walk to the mall together, Bisengo says, she would lag after holding a rock behind her back battling an impulse to hit her mother with it. Whenever her mother would talk to her, Bisengo would fight with her. She would also fight with her aunts, who are so close to her own age she refers to them as her sisters.

“I was a very disturbed child; I never wanted to listen to anybody,” she says. “My mom basically kind of gave up; she was like, ‘I don’t know what to do with this child; she has experienced so much. I don’t know what to do.’ ”

A friend advised Bisengo’s mother to get her involved in sports activities, so Bisengo was sent to a nearby martial arts after school program. She says the experience helped her focus on regaining a normal life.

“My mom pretty much kept me busy with martial arts and also with basketball, stuff to distract me and not allow me to have enough time to sit in my room and think about what happened,” Bisengo says.

Whenever she got a bad grade or report card in school, her mother would tell the martial arts instructor. He would have Bisengo do extra exercises, like push-ups or running, as a way to motivate her to improve. The activity proved to be a helpful.

When she was about 18 years old, she took another step towards reconciling with her past. Her mother’s boss suggested Bisengo talk to someone about what happened to her, and referred the family to a social worker. Bisengo made an appointment, but says she didn’t see the point in talking to a stranger who couldn’t possibly understand the things she experienced. Even though the social worker wasn’t really able to tell her how to deal with her pain, Bisengo says the session was helpful in other ways.

“That was a step towards me talking about my story,” Bisengo says. “After I talked to her I said, ‘OK, I talked to her, I can talk to anybody.’ ”

She began talking to her teachers and recounting her experiences whenever the class would discuss Africa or Rwanda and when her class studied the Holocaust. Sharing her story finally enabled her to cope with her trauma.

“I started talking about it, and then I went on to realize that yes, my dad and my brothers are gone. They’re not going to come back. But I have my mom, I have another younger brother who was born in the war, my mom was pregnant during that time, and I have Rachel and I have another [aunt] Nancy,” Bisengo sasy. “So even though my dad is gone at least I have someone else to call mom, I have someone else to call sister, someone to call brother.”

The very fact she survived when so many others did not made her realize there must be a reason why she was alive. She says she has decided to stop thinking about the past and start focusing on the future — helping others and on trying to prevent future genocides.

Valentine Bagirimvano, a University of Delaware sophomore, left Rwanda in 1994 when violence started breaking out in the country. She says she and her family lived in Zaire and Kenya before moving to the U.S. in 1999. Though several of her aunts and uncles were killed during the genocide, Bagirimvano says she doesn’t remember much from that time in her life.

“We had a good life there, a nice house. We had maids,” Bagirimvano says. “We weren’t rich but we were well-off.”

When they fled Rwanda, her family was left with nothing. Their first few years living in the U.S. were spent in a trailer until they had saved up enough money for a house. She is now paying her own way through school and plans to become a nurse.

“The whole genocide thing made me want to help others. From the medical field you can go help people that are actually hurt,” she says. “The whole reason I’m going into the medical field is I hope that I can go to Rwanda and other places that are not as well off. Hopefully, I can go there and help for a year or two years or something to just make a difference.”

Bisengo says she also wants to work in Rwanda after she graduates, a goal she set for herself after returning to her home country this past June. She says she felt excitement and fear as she tried to picture what it would be like when she landed in Rwanda for the first time in 16 years.

“For so long, my heart has always been scared — what’s going to happen when I go back? The person who killed my father, is he going to come after me? Is anyone going to remember me? Am I going to find any family members?” she says. “What is the point of going back when I have nothing to go to?”

When her plane landed on June 2, Bisengo says she was shocked to see the way the country had managed to pull itself back together after the genocide. Everyone around her was smiling, though she says she could still sense an underlying pain.

During her second week in Rwanda, she learned the man who killed her father was alive and still living in the same house where the murder took place. She says once her aunt heard the news, she took the man to court. Bisengo never met the man, since friends and family advised her against it, but she spent the next several weeks telling her story to a lawyer as a witness for the case.

She didn’t allow painful memories monopolize her experience. The best part of her trip, she says, was meeting her father’s older sister. She and Bisengo are the only surviving blood-relatives of her father. Her newly found aunt has several children, most of whom started families of their own, giving Bisengo an unexpected extended family in Rwanda.

“I had family members who loved me who were telling me stories about my dad. I had people telling me I look like my dad, I had people telling me I act like my dad,” she says. “Everything there was good news, nothing bad. It was so exciting.”

Bisengo says she was so happy in Rwanda that when she left, she left in tears. She had to return to the U.S. before the court case against the man who killed her father was settled, but her family members continued fighting for her. She says they found eye witnesses to testify against him, and she heard in the beginning of October he was sentenced to 30 years in jail.

“He still doesn’t admit what he did, but I somehow felt like justice was done. I felt like I could rest,” she says. Timothy Longman, a visiting associate professor at Boston University, was in Rwanda in the years leading up to the genocide doing research for his dissertation on the genocide and its causes. He says the chief organizers of the genocide should be held accountable for their crimes. However, Rwandan local court systems have tried about one million people for genocide crimes and he says this is excessive.

He says he spoke with several organizations, such as the United Nations Assistance Mission to Rwanda. He contended the idea the courts are trying anyone who was present during the killing, even though everyone was legally required to participate in patrols during the genocide, otherwise they could be punished as traitors.

“The ambassador’s position was, ‘Well yeah, but if someone was present then they’re responsible,’ ” Longman says. “That’s not really leaving the situation to rest. If it evolves into a reverse genocide that’s not at all helpful.”

It can be equally dangerous to leave human rights violations unchecked, which is why Longman says accountability for organizers is necessary. But for average Rwandan citizens another form of reconciliation could be more appropriate.

Bisengo says it is her duty as a survivor to tell her story, so people are aware genocide is not a thing of the past but something that goes on in the world today.

“This really did happen,” she says. “There are numerous times I wake up in the middle of the night and I’m like, ‘I am dreaming; I’m going to wake up and my dad will be there. I’m going to wake up one day and everything’s going to be
perfect.’ ”

Bisengo says she learned a lot about her father’s role in the community when she was visiting Rwanda. He was generous and always helped others, and she hopes to continue his legacy either through social work or by joining a government group to help Rwandan citizens deal with their problems.

Still, her most important goal is promoting her experience with mass violence and the havoc it wreaks on a country, a community and a family.

“It’s just not human; it really doesn’t make any sense. Do you really have to take it to that level where you have to kill someone just because they’re different from you?” Bisengo says. “This would be a boring world if we were all the same. The whole purpose of having all of us here is to learn from each other.”