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Dec. 28, 2007
Genocide – Poland to Rwanda
A Vancouver woman travels the world trying to make sense of the incomprehensible.
KELLEY KORBIN
Hinda Avery is a former women's studies professor who has used her retirement to pursue the effects of some of the biggest atrocities of the 20th century.
What began as a desire to track the journey numerous members of her family took at the hands of the Nazis, quickly took on a much bigger scope. Avery is clearly fixated on these family members, particularly the women whom, in another post-retirement effort, she has been painting. Her paintings show talent both for their esthetic value and for their sardonic wit. The "Rosen women" are portrayed as resistance fighters, sometimes in their classic Eastern European practical skirts and blouses and sometimes painted in brightly patterned fatigues.
A large painting of the Rosen women, accompanied by the text, "The Rosen women on a break from their duties as saboteurs whose mission is to plot the overthrow of the Third Reich," monopolizes the stark white wall in the dining room of Avery's sparely appointed home.
Avery visited Poland shortly after her retirement in 2002.
"I went to find out where my grandparents, my aunt, her twins, her husband were murdered," she explained of the purpose for her trip. Unfortunately, she wasn't able to gather any useful information about what happened to her family. However, what she did gain was a fascination with Holocaust memorials - what she described as "how a country apologizes." This interest took her to Germany, where she directed a video about such memorials.
Avery then expanded her Holocaust studies to include other genocides, including those in China and Armenia. In examining these massacres, she became intensely interested in the aftermath of genocide, particularly with respect to what happens to the female survivors.
Earlier this year, Avery embarked on a three-week visit to Rwanda, a stunningly beautiful country surrounded by Uganda, Burundi, the Congo and Tanzania, where, in horrifyingly violent acts, an estimated one million people were killed in a calculated genocide that took place over a few months in 1994.
Avery does not claim to be any sort of expert in the history of Rwanda nor the genocide that took place there. However, she gave the Independent a sneak preview of a slide show that she has prepared from her visit to the country, complete with a comprehensive introduction to the political history of the area.
Rwanda is an incredibly poor and tiny agrarian country of eight million, with a per capita average yearly income of about $1,200 and an average life expectancy of 40, explained Avery. For hundreds of years, Rwanda had a system comprised of three classes: the Tutsi, traditionally the cattle owners and the wealthiest class, who made up about 14 per cent of the population; the Hutus, the farmers who made up 85 per cent of the country; and the tiny minority, Twa.
Avery stated that there was never an ethnic distinction between these strata of the Rwandan nation, just a socioeconomic one, and that before the Belgians took over colonial rule from the Germans after the First World War, there was always the ability to move from one socioeconomic class to another by acquiring, or losing, wealth.
This all changed with Belgian rule, said Avery. The Belgians promoted ethnic distinctions and created artificial differences between the Tutsis and the Hutus. To facilitate this, they "would measure noses and skulls," she said. According to this practice, a narrow nose and a bigger skull belonged to a Tutsi.
By the 1930s, Rwandan citizens were obliged to carry identification cards stating to which group they belonged.
Avery mused that it became clear to her that "the Belgians were almost as bad as the Nazis."
At first, the colonizing power declared the Tutsis as superior and used the collaboration of this wealthier class of Rwandans to support their colonial rule. However, by the 1950s, as the Tutsis became wealthier and a coinciding wave of anti-colonialism greeted the Belgians, they decided to switch allegiances and began to support the Hutus.
The ensuing violence ultimately led to a huge exodus of Tutsis from Rwanda into refugee camps in neighboring Uganda and Burundi, where they eventually formed, in 1973, their own paramilitary force, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), with a goal to reclaim their homeland.
Here, Avery couldn't help but interject, "there are a lot of parallels between the Tutsis and the Palestinians." Indeed, Rwanda's path to genocide has parallels all over the world, including the Americans' handling of Iraq.
While the exiled Tutsis were building the RPF, the seeds of the impending genocide had already been sewn in the power base of the Rwandan government. In 1962, the country received its independence from Belgium and a fairly moderate Hutu government took control, until JuvÈnal Habyarimana took power, as president, in 1973. Fearful of the RPF, Habyarimana capitalized from his labelling of the Tutsis as a common enemy of Hutu Rwandans.
It wasn't until 1990 that the RPF was able to make any real territorial gains in Rwanda. At this point, surrounding African nations tried to broker a peace deal between the government and the Tutsis but these attempts, which had received a positive reception from the Rwandan president, were thwarted when Habyarimana was assassinated in 1994 and his extremist wife and her family took over control of the country.
According to Avery, the plan for the ensuing genocide had been hatched many years previous and was carefully plotted by Hutu Rwandan intellectuals who studied Nazi strategies for annihilating Jews and determined that, to be successful in eradicating the Tutsis, they would have to galvanize a "people's army" to do their killing for them. They believed that if the people all had blood on their hands, then the frightened, guilty populous would support the government.
This people's army, the interahamwe (those who fight together) was comprised of disenfranchised Rwandans, poor people, unemployed people and even children – mostly illiterate – who were indoctrinated through the use of the media to believe that if they didn't kill the Tutsis, the Tutsis would kill them. Radio stations recited lists of Tutsi "cockroaches" to be murdered. The "troops" were encouraged to get high on drugs and go out and hack and bludgeon people to death.
While the manner of the executions were distinct – with the Nazis choosing to employ a calculated, methodical and relatively "clean" system and the Hutus resorting to brutal and vicious violence – there is no doubt that both of these genocides were meticulously planned and executed, said Avery.
To Avery, this illustrates how easily humans can be indoctrinated. "I ask myself, 'Would I be able to be indoctrinated to the extent the Rwandans were, if I were put in that position....' " At this point, she paused and sighed.
Today, according to Avery, Rwanda oozes with grief and the pain of the genocide is palpable everywhere.
In order to try and understand how a country, and particularly its women, move forward even while they are still reeling from the terror, she visited three of the myriad organizations that are working to help repair Rwanda's wounds: the Rwanda Women's Network, World Vision Rwanda and the Association of Genocide Widows.
The female survivors of the Rwandan genocide have to live with horrors that are virtually impossible to fathom.
"I felt it such a privilege to meet these people," said Avery, who is a slim, petite woman with grey hair, a pale complexion and an impish smile. In her slides, she looks distinctly out of place surrounded by the tall, dark African women she met in Rwanda. And yet, she said that by being there and meeting them, "they ceased being 'the other' ... I was able to see them as the intelligent, sensitive, hurting women who had come together to cry 13 years after the event. Their pain was incomprehensible and the price they're paying – not only were they raped, their children killed, their husbands killed, but now they have AIDS and they don't have any decent shelter, clothing and food.
"I felt I was back in the Holocaust. I [had] visited many concentration camp sites, now I was with survivors instead of war memorials. It was as if I was in a concentration camp site with the survivors. I was traumatized ... the unfairness of it all."
Avery was notably impressed with World Vision. It was at their facility that she met a remarkable couple: Alice and Emmanuel. Alice lost her right hand to a machete-wielding attacker; her baby was hacked to death in front of her by the same man. Emmanuel, sitting next to Alice in the photograph Avery took, was the perpetrator. And here they were, sitting together on a couch, having made some sort of reconciliation.
"[Alice] said she could either live her life as a poisoned person or choose to forgive him in the way that she could, so she wouldn't be poisoned for life," explained Avery, as if this reasoning could clarify this almost inconceivable act of forgiveness. "I got the sense that he's just as much a victim as she was. For me, the two of them symbolize the futility and brutality of human warfare."
Emmanuel has pledged to be in Alice's service for the rest of his life.
Another project that touched Avery's spirit is a plan by the Association of Genocide Widows to build a facility for elderly women who are on their own with nowhere to live and nobody to care for them. The group, which is run exclusively by women who lost their husbands in the genocide, including the vice-president of the organization, whose six children were all murdered, has purchased the land but does not have the funds to construct the buildings. Avery hopes to find someone with the energy and resources to make this project happen. "It resonates with me because I, too, am an older woman who worries about what will happen to her," she said.
Avery acknowledged a direct correlation between her heritage and her interest in helping the women of Rwanda. "If some members of my family hadn't been murdered by the Nazis, I probably wouldn't have gone to Rwanda," she said.
Anyone interested in seeing Avery's slide show is invited to call her at 604-222-4491 for details on when and where she will be presenting it.
Kelley Korbin is a Vancouver freelance writer.
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