After a 10 month battle with breast cancer that included chemo and radiation, losing my hair, losing my sense of humor for a short while, undergoing a complete hysterectomy, and feeling as though I might never regain my energy…
I’M BACK!
Not only have I recovered, but I’m cancer free! So, the bottom line is:

And I can now get back to work on my Rwandan initiative, specifically the first International Interfaith Symposium in Rwanda!
As I’d lost so many months, I needed to return to Rwanda to re-energize this project – check to make sure the quotations on the hotel and safari components were still valid, work with the group we formed four years ago, the Coalition for Interfaith Relations (CIRR), who will be putting together this symposium, complete the task assignments, and all of the hundreds of other details that need to be identified and completed before a conference of this type and scale can be mounted.
One of the side effects from the cancer, though, is that I’ve been asked not to fly for more than 8 hours at a time because of the very real potential for blood clots. That necessitated a stopover in Brussels. And since I don’t vacation well, I wanted to find something in Brussels that could contribute to the symposium.
The Auschwitz Foundation in Brussels
As I was planning this trip several weeks ago, I came across the Auschwitz Foundation, located in Brussels. The Belgian Association of former political prisoners in Auschwitz-Birkenau and Silesian Camps and Prisons founded the Auschwitz Foundation in 1980.
Its main goal is to study the history and remembrance of Nazi crimes and Genocide, the awareness of them, the transmission of their memory and the preservation of archives concerning them. To achieve these objectives, the Foundation set up a not-for-profit Study and Documentation Center, Remembrance of Auschwitz. The two institutions work together to promote scientific research and multidisciplinary publications with a view to broadening understanding of the historical processes which led to the coming to power of the Third Reich and to Nazi crimes and Genocide, while also developing teaching projects intended for the various education sectors in particular, and for society in general.
Perfect! My first goal for the upcoming trip became, then, to convince the Foundation to work with CIRR to do a co-presentation at the symposium titled “Barriers to Remembrance,” and also to connect the Foundation to the Genocide memorial staff in Rwanda to share ways in which to prevent the memories of these two atrocities – the Holocaust and the Genocide – from fading from the hearts and minds of their communities and the larger world.
HISTORICAL NOTE (Warning: some of this is gruesome):
The Genocide in this tiny Central African country of Rwanda was one of the most intensive killing campaigns -- possibly the most intensive -- in human history. The roots of Rwanda's Genocide lie in its colonial experience. First occupied and colonized by the Germans (1894-1916), during World War I the country was taken over by the Belgians, who ruled until independence in 1962. Utilizing the classic strategy of "divide and rule," the Belgians granted preferential status to the Tutsi minority (constituting somewhere between 8 and 14 percent of the population at the time of the 1994 Genocide).
In pre-colonial Rwanda, the Tutsis had dominated the small Rwandan aristocracy, -but ethnic divisions between them and the majority Hutus (at least 85 percent of the population in 1999) were always fluid. Nor was inter-communal conflict the norm. There had always been a strong sense among Rwandans of belonging to a Rwandan nation, and before around 1960, violence along ethnic lines was uncommon and mass murder of the sort seen in 1994 was unheard of.
Whatever communal cleavages existed were sharply heightened by Belgian colonial policy. Using physical characteristics as a guide – the Tutsi were generally tall, thin, and more 'European' in their appearance than the shorter, stockier Hutu – the colonizers decided that the Tutsi and the Hutu were two different races. According to the racial theories of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Tutsi, with their more 'European' appearance, were deemed the “master race.” By 1930 Belgium's Rwandan auxiliary government was almost entirely Tutsi, a status that earned them the durable hatred of the Hutu.
It was also the Belgians who (in 1933) instituted the identity-card system that designated every Rwandan as Hutu, Tutsi, or Twa (the aboriginal group that in 1990 comprised about 1 percent of the Rwandan population). The identity cards were retained into the post-independence era, and provided crucial assistance to the architects of Genocide as they sought to isolate their Tutsi victims.
As Africa moved towards decolonization after World War II, it was the better-educated and more prosperous Tutsis who led the struggle for independence. Accordingly, the Belgians switched their allegiance to the Hutus. Vengeful Hutu elements murdered about 15,000 Tutsis between 1959 and 1962, and more than 100,000 Tutsis fled to neighboring countries, notably Uganda and Burundi. Tutsis remaining in Rwanda were stripped of much of their wealth and status under the regime of Juvénal Habyarimana, installed in 1973. An estimated one million Tutsis fled the country (it is in part this massive outflow that makes the proportion of Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994 so difficult to determine). After 1986, Tutsis in Uganda formed a guerrilla organization, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), which aimed to invade Rwanda and overthrow the Habyarimana regime.
In 1990, the RPF launched its invasion, occupying zones in the northeast of Rwanda. In August 1993, at the Tanzanian town of Arusha, Habyarimana finally accepted an internationally mediated peace treaty, which granted the RPF a share of political power and a military presence in the capital, Kigali. Some 5,000 U.N. peacekeepers (UNAMIR, the United Nations Assistance Mission to Rwanda) were dispatched to bolster the accord. But Hutu extremists in Habyarimana's government did not accept the peace agreement. Some of these extremists, who were high-level government officials and military personnel, had begun devising their own solution to the “Tutsi problem” as early as 1992. Habyarimana's controversial decision to make peace with the RPF won others over to their side, including opposition leaders. Many of those involved in planning the 1994 Genocide saw themselves as patriots, defending their country against outside aggression. Moderate Hutus who supported peace with the RPF also became their targets. This was the so-called "Hutu Power" movement that organized and supervised the holocaust of April-July 1994.
On April 6, 1994, President Habyarimana's plane was shot down by a surface-to-air missile as it approached Kigali airport. Responsibility for the assassination has never been confirmed, but the speed with which the Genocide was subsequently launched strongly suggests that the Hutu extremists had decided to rid themselves of their accommodationist president, and implement a "final solution" to the “Tutsi problem" in Rwanda.
Within 24 hours of Habyarimana's jet being downed, roadblocks sprang up around Kigali, manned by the so-called interahamwe militia (the name means "those who attack together"). Tutsis were separated from Hutus and hacked to death with machetes along the roadsides (although many taller Hutus were presumed to be Tutsis and were also killed). Doing murder with a machete is exhausting, so the militias were organized to work in shifts. “At the day's end, the Achilles tendons of unprocessed victims were sometimes cut before the murderers retired to rest, to feast on the victims' cattle and to drink. Victims who could afford to pay often chose to die from a bullet.” (Wrage, "Genocide in Rwanda.") Meanwhile, death-squads working from carefully prepared lists went from neighborhood to neighborhood in Kigali. They murdered not only Tutsis but also moderate Hutus, including the prime minister, Agathe Uwilingiyimana. He had been guarded by a detachment of Belgian soldiers; these were arrested, disarmed, tortured, and murdered, prompting Belgium – as intended – to withdraw the remainder of its U.N. troops from Rwanda.
With breathtaking rapidity, the Genocide expanded from Kigali to the countryside. Government radio encouraged Tutsis to congregate at churches, schools, and stadiums, pledging that these would serve as places of refuge. Thus concentrated, the helpless civilians could be more easily targeted – although many miraculously managed to resist with only sticks and stones for days or even weeks, until the forces of the Rwandan army and presidential guard were brought in to exterminate them with machine-guns and grenades. By April 21 – that is, in just two weeks -- perhaps a quarter of a million Tutsis and moderate Hutus had been slaughtered. Together with the mass murder of Soviet prisoners-of-war during World War II, it was the most concentrated act of Genocide in human history. "The dead of Rwanda accumulated at nearly three times the rate of Jewish dead during the Holocaust." (Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda [Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998], p. 3.) (Gérard Prunier provides an even higher estimate: "the daily killing rate was at least five times that of the Nazi death camps." Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide [Columbia University Press, 1995], p. 261.)
By the end of April, according to Human Rights Watch, "the worst massacres had finished ... perhaps half of the Tutsi population of Rwanda" had been murdered.
A Proposal to the Auschwitz Foundation
Clearly, Belgium has some historical culpability for the Genocide, yet somewhat understandably no reparations have ever been made. President Clinton and UN head Kofi Annan have been very apologetic. The Catholic Church was apologetic for bishops who went astray and who aided the Interahamwe militias in the Genocide. But many Rwandans readily admit that more than 40 years of independence from Belgian rule complicates things.
However, a collaboration between two organizations that focus on various issues of mass killings – the Holocaust and the Genocide – with one organization located in the country that, some say, at least in part created the Genocide – could be a small, but important “reparation” to Rwanda – not through money given but through expertise and compassionate sharing, just exactly the type of capacity building the Rwandans ask for and need.
I started writing e-mails asking for an appointment with the Executive Director and other staff members of the Auschwitz Foundation to propose this partnership during my brief stay in Brussels.
Unfortunately, none of the e-mails I wrote ever got to them. The portal on their website, through which one can contact staff members, was not operational.
Fortunately, Daniel Weyssow, the person in charge of the Auschwitz Prize and their activities in Brussels, graciously agreed to see me.

Over coffee in their offices, Mr. Weyssow agreed with me that the idea was a very good one, and that a collaboration of this sort made a great deal of sense. He told me he would speak with their Executive Director about the proposal and get back with me by the end of next week.
I felt so great after this meeting that I did as my daughter, Chloe, suggested and had a wonderful Belgian hot cocoa
while sitting outside at a table on the Grand Place, and wandered around Brussels for a while before calling it a night.

Back to Rwanda
After another 8-hour flight the next day, I arrived back “home” in Kigali, Rwanda where my Rwandan family met me – many of the people I’ve written about in this blog in previous years. But the most exuberant of all was Celestin,
my “son,” driver, and good friend. Calling me “Mommy” as both a term of respect for older women and as recognition of me as his adoptive mother, he bundled all of the luggage into the rented car and sped off to the Lemigo Hotel, the site of the upcoming symposium. Quite a bit of an upscale from where I usually stay, I’d been promised a junior suite that contained a meeting room but, apparently, the man who’d had the suite had missed his flight and was staying another night. So I was given a "regular" room where neither the air conditioning nor the shower worked. But since I'm used to not having either one while in Rwanda, this was no big deal for me. (Today I was moved – not once but twice – into my final (I hope) set of rooms for this visit, just what I’d been promised!)
The first official work day was today, meeting with David Bucura and Therese Mukamanzi from the CIRR Executive Committee over lunch to plan out the week in as much detail as possible. (As my friend, Baraka, always tells me though, “TIA – This is Africa!” In other words, be ready for changes.) Then out with Celestin to change money, buy several cases of water, and other errands before dinner and blog writing.
Tomorrow: Meeting with the Executive Committee and Symposium Planning
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