O orfanato

Memorial won't let massacre fade
A monument of bones honors tens of thousands of Tutsis slaughtered in the genocide of 1994

By PAUL NEVILLE
The Register-Guard

BISESERO, Rwanda - Ngarambe Vedaste is standing next to a mountain of bones.

Shattered skulls, jawbones, hip bones, ribs, spinal columns, legs, hands - they've all been gathered here in a mound as big as a two-story house. There are remnants of clothing - a jacket, a sock, a ball cap. Even five years after the massacre, the stench of death overwhelms visitors.

Near the top is a torso held intact by sun-bleached tendons. It appears to be a small person, perhaps a woman, cringing from a death blow.

This is Bisesero - a steep, craggy region in the remote province of Kibuye on the country's westernmost edge.

It is here that an estimated 50,000 starving, desperate Tutsi men, women and children fled in the final days of the genocide in 1994.

It is here that the Tutsis, armed with clubs and stones, mounted their last defense against the Hutu government's death squads, hoping in vain for the nations of the world to intervene.

It is here that tens of thousands of Tutsis were hacked to death with machetes and small scythes called pongas.

And, it is here that Vedaste is building a powerful memorial - literally made of bones - to the souls who fought for their lives.

"We had a belief that if the people could resist long enough, if they could fight hard enough, then they would survive," he says. "But that was not true. Not in this place."

The 30-year-old Vedaste, 6 foot 8 inches tall with a .45-caliber revolver tucked in the belt of his combat fatigues, explains that he was born and raised in Bisesero, but was away when the slaughter began in summer 1994, studying architecture in the Congo. But he soon quit to join the rebel army made up of Tutsi expatriates.

The rebels moved swiftly, and by late summer had taken the capital of Kigali and overthrown the Hutu regime. But even then, the bloodshed continued at Bisesero as Hutus passed through on their way into exile, killing as they fled.

Vedaste estimates that 300 members of his extended family lived in Bisesero and the villages below. After the massacre, there were none - he was alone when he returned to his ancestral home after the fighting was over.

"They are lying here before you - they are somewhere in this pile," Vedaste says, sweeping a long arm over the bones next to where he's standing.

It was on that first return home that he had the vision for the memorial. It would begin with the gathering of the remains, which had been hacked into pieces and scattered over the ground, stuffed into latrines, thrown into bushes.

"Those of us who returned would walk in the bush and hear bones cracking under our feet," Vedaste says. "So we brought them to this place."

As the government-sponsored memorial nears completion, the survivors of Bisesero still seek justice.

Some accused architects of the massacre are awaiting trial in the United Nations' International War Crimes Tribunal in Tanzania. Others remain at large.

Whether they're found or not, Vedaste plans to have all their names inscribed on a wall that is part of the monument.

"Their names will be there for generations - forever - for all the world to see," he says.

Rivers choked by bodies

More than a tenth of the population died in this Central African nation in less than three months in 1994, a systematic attempt by the Hutu government to annihilate the Tutsi minority.

United Nations officials have estimated that the hurricane of killing claimed 80 percent of the genocide victims in just six weeks. That's at least 800,000 people slaughtered, most by machete - a daily killing rate at least five times greater than that of the Nazi death camps.

Garbage trucks were used to pick up the dead in the capital of Kigali. The bodies often were piled 4 or 5 feet high - so many that relief workers resorted to bulldozer burials. Rivers were choked with bodies - so many that Lake Victoria became seriously polluted.

Historians say many factors led to the slaughter - poverty, ignorance, superstition, the political violence between Hutus and Tutsis that began with the Hutu revolution of 1959; the guerrilla war waged by expatriate Tutsis in the 1990s; and the mysterious downing of the jet that carried Hutu dictator, Juvenal Habyarimana, whose death enabled Hutu extremists to seize power and begin the slaughter of Tutsis.

But most agree that the critical factor was the radical polarization of the Hutu and Tutsi populations under Belgian colonial rule from 1923 to 1962.

The Belgians promoted the concept of ethnic supremacy and elevated first the Tutsis as an ethnic group and then the Hutus, encouraging each to dominate the other, says French historian Gerard Prunier, who recently wrote a book about the genocide.

The supreme irony is that the ethnic groups have mixed so completely over the years that they're no longer considered distinct by most historians such as Prunier. But identification with one group or the other proved a matter of life and death in 1994.

`They are coming to kill you'

There is little, at first, to suggest to a first-time visitor that anything out of the ordinary ever happened in Rwanda.

Take a drive down any rural road and you'll see women with babies wrapped tight against their backs and carrying huge baskets loaded with avocados or bananas.

Boys roll wooden wheels with sticks and shout greetings whenever they see a mzungu (white person). Hillsides that were once burned are now green and replanted with banana plantations.

But it doesn't take long before you begin to notice the burned-out hulks of cars and mini-buses, the bullet holes on the sides of buildings and walls in Kigali.

Just outside Butare, 60 miles south of Kigali, gangs of men do manual labor in bright pink shirts and pants - they're Hutu prisoners, among an estimated 250,000 charged with participating in the killing and still awaiting trial.

In the city of Kibuye, the provincial capital in western Rwanda, a gated wall surrounds a mass grave - one of dozens throughout the country. A hand-lettered sign reads - "Cemetery: More than 10,000 people were inhumated here."

Fighting continues in some border areas, clashes between troops of the new Tutsi government and Hutu rebels based in neighboring countries.

The distant pop of gunfire can be heard at L'Esperance Children's Center in Mugonero in western Kibuye Province, where 100 children - nearly all of them orphans of the war -live.

Pastor Eleazzar Kwizera, the center's director, points out abandoned adobe huts that scatter the surrounding hillsides. They are, he says, the former homes of many of his orphans.

"In many of them you can still see the blood stains on the walls - the blood never goes away," he says.

He points to a hut just beyond a clump of trees where an orphan, now a 14-year-old nursing student named Jaclyn, once lived.

Her parents were among hundreds of local Tutsis who fled to a nearby church seeking refuge, but the death squads came and killed her parents and sisters. Jaclyn was slashed in the head and left to die.

The wound was deep, but she managed to crawl out of the church. After a day of hiding in the bushes, she emerged the next night and went down to a river where she drank and washed. Then she walked into the hills where she found a relative who was also in hiding and helped her elude the death squads.

Kwizera says Jaclyn still suffers from headaches and sleeplessness. "She dreams often that men are coming to kill her with pongas," he says.

Germaine Rachel works at the orphanage as a cook and house mother. Kwizera fondly calls the 79-year-old woman his "Mum."

She previously worked as a nurse at the Adventist hospital in Mugonero from 1939 until one day in April 1994.

Rachel, who is half Tutsi and half Belgian, recalls how nearly 2,000 Tutsis, some wounded in other attacks, fled to the hospital compound for protection at the invitation of the president of the Adventist church, a pastor named Elizaphan Ntakirutimana.

But Rachel, a thin woman with a soft voice, says the opposite was true. She says she learned that death squads were on the way at the invitation of Ntakirutimana and his son, the hospital administrator.

Because she was only half Tutsi, Rachel says she was warned to flee - and escorted out of the compound - by Ntakirutimana himself. "He told me, 'You are not Tutsi. Run quick - they are coming to kill you.' "

Rachel ran and lived. But her Tutsi co-workers were slaughtered when carloads of men armed with machetes and scythes arrived shortly after 9 a.m. on the morning of April 16.

''My friends were all killed - every one of them," Rachel says.

Ten-thousand miles away in Laredo, Texas, Elizaphan Ntakirutimana sits in a jail cell and awaits extradition to the United Nations' International War Crimes Tribunal in Tanzania, where he has been indicted on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity. His son, Gerard, already is in custody and is awaiting trial.

"I believe this - that if the people are patient, there will be justice," Kwizera says.

Memorial made of skulls

In honor of the Tutsi resistance at Bisesero, the government last year held the fourth anniversary of the genocide there.

Rwandan President Pasteur Bizimungo laid a foundation stone for the Resistance Memorial, which clings to the side of a mountain summit in this high country.

Ngarambe Vedaste built the monument that way for a reason: He wants all those who make the grueling climb to suffer not only emotionally but also physically. Just like the men, women and children who died.

"Perhaps in that way they can become one with the people who died," he says.

It's the dead themselves who serve as portals to the memorial. The first stop up the steep steps is a tower with a large mound of skulls inside.

"I want people to feel that they have entered the valley of the shadow of death," Vedaste says.

There are four more tall brick towers that will contain the rest of the remains, which will be chemically treated for preservation.

"These buildings are open graves," Vedaste says.

It's a rough climb through the rest of the monument, a climb laden with symbolism.

Near the summit is a small grove of trees, each cut off just a few feet above the ground, their trunks peeled and painted blood red. "We cut these trees, just as the hopes of the people were cut - just as their lives were cut short," Vedaste says.

"We are doing this so people will remember what happened here," he says. "We are like the Jews - we must remember."