Surviving genocide
Photo by The Moon Magazine
Originally published on The Moon Magazine
Immaculée Ilibagiza was a 22-year-old engineering student at the National University of Rwanda in 1994 when life as she had known it came to a horrific end. Over the course of approximately one hundred days following the assassination of Hutu president Juvénal Habyarimana, the remaining Hutu leadership, supported by the national army, local military and civil officials, mass media and ordinary Hutus, carried out the slaughter of as many as one million Tutsis.
When the killing began, Immaculée’s father sent her to the home of a nearby pastor, who hid Immaculée and seven other women in a cramped bathroom measuring three feet by four feet. There wasn’t enough room for all of the women to have their own place on the floor, so the larger ones held the smaller women on their laps. The women had to maintain silence, as the pastor was hiding them even from his family, out of fear that a careless remark by one of his children might endanger them all. To carry out this subterfuge, the pastor could feed the women only what was left on the plates of his family members. The women could not even flush the toilet unless they heard another toilet in the house flush.
Their imprisonment lasted ninety-one days but saved their lives. At one point, men with machetes searched the pastor’s house shouting that they would kill Immaculée and any other Tutsis they found. Someone came as close as the bathroom door, put a hand on the doorknob, but inexplicably, didn’t open it. By the time the killing was over, Immaculée had lost half her body weight, but she was alive. Her family wasn’t so lucky: her parents, two of her three siblings, and most of her extended family had been brutally killed.
Immaculée’s story of survival is miraculous enough; but even more inspirational is her journey from devastation to forgiveness. Encouraging others that forgiveness is possible is the work to which she has devoted her life for the last nineteen years. Her book, Left to Tell, has sold more than 250,000 copies worldwide and has been made into a documentary. She speaks to audiences all over the world—to political leaders, the heads of multinational corporations, church groups, human rights organizations, universities and elementary school children, and many others. The importance of her story has been recognized and honored with numerous humanitarian awards, including an honorary doctoral degree from the University of Notre Dame, and the 2007 Mahatma Gandhi International Award for Reconciliation and Peace.
Four years after the Rwandan tragedy, Immaculée immigrated to the United States to continue her work for the United Nations in New York City. She has since established the Left to Tell Charitable Fund to help others heal from the long-term effects of genocide and war. The fund has raised over $150,000 for the orphans of Rwanda.
The MOON: When you look back over the nearly twenty years since the genocide, can you say how your ordeal changed you?
Immaculée: Those three months changed every aspect of my life. When I went into that bathroom I was a child. I trusted people for who they said they were. I trusted our leaders. I trusted them to follow the laws they put in place—to be the first to uphold the first law of society, which is not to hurt anyone. But those three months in the bathroom taught me that those laws and those people—everything I trusted and believed in—were changeable. People didn’t necessarily believe or follow what they said. Even those people who told others to do good were capable of doing bad. What I found when I came out of that bathroom made me turn in on myself and search my heart to see what were my values; what did I believe. It made me figure out how could I contribute to the peace I believed in—even if the people in charge were not living by those values. I came out of the ordeal more my own person.
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Part 2:
Originally published on The Moon Magazine
At first I was broken, as you can imagine. All the people I had loved and who had loved me so much were dead. I had no one left so I had to lean on God. And I had to lean on the values I believed in, like kindness. I decided that no one had to prove their worth for me to treat them kindly. I needed to be kind because that was the only way to create the world I wanted to live in. My world had been destroyed by people who had forgotten about love; if I wanted a different world, I had to be different. So, as a result of my experience, I have grown a lot in many ways. The experience strengthened my commitment to my own values regardless of what other people did.
The MOON: You mention that it strengthened your faith in God. But a lot of people would have come out of that experience angry at God, demanding to know how any so-called God could have let such a thing happen.
Immaculée: You know, I understand why people can get angry at God, but the truth is, there’s no other way. If you turn your back on God, where can you go? Where can you live? What can you hold on to? There is nothing else.
I went through anger, too. I had a good reason to be angry, at least in my mind. But I was dying alive because of my anger. My head hurt, my stomach hurt all the time. I was sweating out of anger. I couldn’t remember how to smile any more. Nothing made me happy. I was only hurting myself! The only thing that brought me a little bit of light was the idea of God.
It’s true I had many angry questions to ask of God: How could you let this happen? But the answer came in my heart: “When I gave you free will I meant it.”
People get to choose. We’re not in a cage. Free will is a dangerous thing, and it’s also a wonderful thing. I really appreciate people writing about the genocide in Rwanda so that it inspires people to choose wisely. The world benefits every time people choose good. The person doing good benefits, and we all benefit.
It’s not right for people to act as if they don’t care because a war is happening somewhere else, or if people far away are having trouble. We really shouldn’t act as if it’s not our business. A person who is losing his sense of love, or sense of gratitude, is going to affect other people by his actions. It’s like someone who is careless with fire; sooner or later everyone in the house will be affected. That’s how I came to understand the situation in Rwanda. We were all affected by a number of people who chose to be hate-filled; who made wrong decisions. Maybe we knew about it, but we chose to ignore it, instead of doing anything to pray for them, or educate them, or inspire them, or address the injustices that were troubling them.
So I felt as if God was speaking inside my heart. You know, we all have God inside us. You ask questions and somehow tomorrow you have an answer, right in your heart. When I asked God, “Why is this happening?!” the answer I got was, “Look in the Bible.”
The Bible gives us commandments—but I don’t think they’re for God’s benefit, or because God wants to be strict. It’s because God is saying, “If you live this way, things will go better for you. Love one another. If you don’t, genocide can happen.”
I felt like God was telling me, “I don’t have my hand there controlling everything. But no matter what happens, ask me, it shall be given. Knock and the door will open. Don’t give up, no matter how many bad things happen.
And then God also reminded me, “Forgive one another.”
That was a horrible thing for me to even think about! How is forgiveness even possible? How dare anyone even ask me to forgive people who wanted to kill me?
But I felt as if God was telling me, “Well, this is what you need to do. This is the direction you need to go in, and if you seek understanding, you will get it. You will understand why forgiveness is necessary. I’m not telling you to do it arbitrarily.”
So slowly I got to feel as if God was actually the only one who had not betrayed or deceived me. I just hadn’t understood His teachings very well. I hadn’t understood free will, and how people can suffer, but you can still hold on to God.
People suffer. Good people suffer. God doesn’t prevent suffering. Look at Mandela. Look at what he went through. Look at Mother Teresa. She didn’t do all those things in joy. No one wants to live every day with dying people. It brings pain, but she decided to return love, no matter how much she was hurting inside.
The MOON: What about the pastor who harbored you? Why do you think he was willing to put his own life—and the lives of his family members—at risk to save eight neighbors? I would like his actions to inspire people because far more of us will witness injustice than be the target of it. Yet if more of us would speak out—or take action—instead of doing nothing out of fear of reprisal, fewer injustices would be committed.
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Part 3:
Originally published on The Moon Magazine
Immaculée: He was a good person. He really was. But I don’t think he knew what was coming. He thought we would be in his bathroom for three or four days. He said, “That’s how long these sorts of things generally last.” And he was only willing to hide women; not men. So I am forever grateful to him for opening his home, but I don’t think that if he knew the danger he was putting himself in he would have done it. He didn’t know they would go door-to-door searching homes. He didn’t know he would be hiding us for three months. At one time he thought it was going to be a year and he wanted to take us out. He told 60 Minutes that at one point he told two of his kids he really trusted that he couldn’t keep us any longer and risk the lives of his family. He was going to let us run away through the lake and hope we would make it to safety.
But his children told him, “Dad, if anything happens to them you will never be able to live with yourself, so I think you should let them stay where they are. If God wants them to leave, we will find someone who will help us. But if they kill them right outside our house, you will never forgive yourself.”
So he admitted that he wouldn’t have hid us if he had known how dangerous it was. Nevertheless, I can say that he was truly a loving and courageous person. It takes love to help others in that kind of situation.
By the way, many Hutus in Rwanda hid people. Oh my God, I truly believe with all my heart that there is no such thing as a bad group of people. There are angels in every group of people who do bad things. Not even half of the Hutus were doing the killing. Hutus are good people! But their leaders were killing in the name of the Hutus, and they wanted everyone to believe that they were a majority. So if you were a Hutu and you even said a good thing about Tutsis, they could kill you. Yet many Hutus were hiding Tutsis nonetheless. Every single day they would find Hutus who were hiding Tutsis in their homes and they would kill the Tutsis in front of them. There was one Hutu who was hiding twelve Tutsis and he told the killers, “If you want to kill them you will have to do it over my dead body.” So they killed him too. There are many heroes in this story, and many of them are Hutus.
The MOON: How do you think this experience has changed your country?
Immaculée: It changed my country in that now we know what suffering is.
The MOON: You didn’t know before?
Immaculée: I don’t think they knew. Rwanda is a very gracious and accommodating country. We have a really beautiful culture. People try to help each other. If you are a woman and you have a baby, the people in the village come and help you for a month. You can barely touch the baby. They want you to lie down and rest for two weeks, so your back can get strong again. Helping each other is in our blood. No one ever cooks for just the people in the household. You always cook for one or two additional people who might drop by. Many people who come to Rwanda to visit say, “It can’t have happened here! People are so helpful!”
So to see that power-hungry politicians could create such a horrible change in our culture was truly a shock. “My neighbor who has been so kind to me now wants to kill me?” People ran away and hid in the bush for months. Their homes were destroyed, their families killed, the infrastructure ruined. The people experienced so much suffering that Rwandans now know the value of peace. They want to ensure that such a nightmare will never return again.
Before the genocide, there were no women in the Rwandan Parliament. Today, fifty-five percent of Parliament is made up of women. We have seen what can happen when people lose heart, so no one wants to discriminate without giving a person a chance. That means any honest person can run for office and be elected.
For thirty years, we had two universities in the entire country. Today we have twenty-seven universities in nineteen years. Every year a new university opens.
Microfinance is very big in Rwanda, enabling even poor people to start new businesses. Every area of the country has high-speed internet! You can be in a tiny village three hours from the capital and have high-speed internet. People are trying so hard to improve.
The MOON: But how did this come about? What process did the country follow so that when the killing of Tutsis stopped, the Tutsis didn’t just start killing Hutus?
Immaculée: I think it was like the Holocaust in Germany. People saw that their leaders could either push the country down, or pull it up. So when the Hutu government started killing Tutsis, many Tutsis left the country and formed a refugee army in exile to stop the genocide. When this army came back into Rwanda, into the capital of Kigali, all the moderate Hutus—all the people who knew the genocide was wrong—joined them. The leadership party was now the minority party and the leaders who had advocated genocide fled the country. A million of them went to the Congo. So the political leadership changed one hundred percent.
For the first two years, the country was engaged in a horrible clean-up effort, removing all the dead bodies from the roads and bushes. You couldn’t travel anywhere without covering your nose because the odor was so bad.
All levels of the government instituted a commitment to end discrimination. It used to be that the government identification cards stated your tribe: Hutu or Tutsi. Now we are all Rwandans. Everyone can get a higher education. If you pass the test that’s all you need. Your tribe doesn’t matter. When you apply for a job, you don’t have to state your tribe. We are all Rwandans. Peace and trust are returning as people see that they don’t have to fear discrimination.
Slowly, because of this new leadership, people are recreating the country. People want to build the country like it used to be—a culture where people help each other, who work together, who value technology and want to see it increase. We had public reconciliation where people told about what happened to them, and that helped them to put it behind them. It was amazing.
A few years after the genocide, while the country was still a mess, President Clinton came and publicly apologized for not taking action to stop it.
If you go to the capital city now, it is so clean. Immediately they planted flowers, paved the side of the road—little things that beautified the city and made people feel hopeful. The size of the city has tripled, but they have building standards so everyone builds in a way that is pleasing with the existing construction. It has taken a long time, but I remember in 2005, when I still worked at the U.N., Rwanda’s economy was growing at a rate second in all of Africa only to Egypt. I remember when Rwanda was in last place. It was the poorest. And the rate of growth of Kigali was the fastest in the whole world.
The MOON: But sometimes growing too fast can be as big a problem as not growing at all.
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Part 4:
Originally published on The Moon Magazine
Immaculée: Yes, you’re right, but Kigali was so small and rural; it was hardly a city at all. So even though it is growing fast, there are still trees, there is still a sense of community, and people in government are paying attention to see that the city grows in a good way. People are working in the fields learning how to farm in a good way; to rotate crops; plant grass; to develop the country in a good way—from the hands of people.
There is still pain in Rwanda, don’t misunderstand. Many children were traumatized and now have mental illness. There are also many orphans. It isn’t as if Rwanda has no problems now. But people have the capacity to postpone their grieving. I think many of us have done that because we had to rebuild our lives and our country.
When I got a job at the U.N. just two months after the genocide, people asked me, “How can you worry about finding a job when you just lost your family?” And the reason was, “Because I have nothing.” I didn’t have a cent in my pocket. I couldn’t buy myself a soda. I wore the same clothes every day for five months. I’d wash and dry them at night and put them on again in the morning. It’s not like that was my style. One month prior, I’d had everything! But you do what you have to do to go on. That’s what Rwandans did; it’s what we had to do.
We had to catch our breath before we could start crying.
The MOON: What an amazing thing you’ve lived through.
Immaculée: Yeah. It definitely grew me a lot. It showed me the good and the bad that life can offer. Since the genocide, I’ve gotten to travel and speak in many places, and I always remind people: “Be happy. Believe me, life can be much worse.”
The MOON: What lessons did Rwanda’s experience teach you that you would like to see learned by the rest of the world?
Immaculée: It is that we were destroyed by hatred. And the only way to ensure that this will never happen again is to love. Reach out to your neighbor, genuinely. Don’t just live for yourself. Whatever job you do, do it with love. Or do what you love. Care about the people you are serving. It is only love that will improve our world. Please also love yourself by forgiving. When you don’t forgive, you are hurting your community, but you are mostly hurting yourself. Because hatred expresses itself in all sorts of devious ways—in illness, bitterness, unhappiness, loneliness. Who wants to be with a hateful person?
If you can’t forgive because you just can’t understand why something happened to you, then get help. Read a book that will help you. Talk to someone who can help you. It’s like when you go to school to learn mathematics. It requires effort but you do it so you can have a better life later. You need to devote the same kind of effort to letting go of anger—so you can have a better life later. So you can live.
I also want to remind people to find something to be grateful about. Count your blessings. Things can always be worse. By counting your blessings they will increase. Appreciation appreciates. Even things that appear to be bad can work towards the good. Sometimes things have to get worse in order for them to get better. This is what happened in Rwanda. We had a beautiful culture, but we didn’t realize how good we had it. At the same time, there were injustices built into it and we didn’t realize how those injustices were causing people to lose hope; to choose hatred over love. So we have to do our best, and find ways to get out of situations that are uncomfortable, but still be joyful about what is good in your life every day.
Finally I want to remind people that no matter how bad things seem, there is always hope. If you are breathing, there is hope. Hold on to God and hope.
I have met the people who killed my family and extended my forgiveness. If I can forgive, anyone can forgive.
The MOON: Tell us about that please.
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Part 5:
Originally published on The Moon Magazine
Immaculée: I went to the prison where the man who had killed my family was in jail. This was three months after the genocide. Some people told me, “You can’t be forgiving so quickly!” But let me tell you, three months in hatred is a long time. It takes years off your life. But when I realized what I was doing, I had to stop it. I hated what these people had done, but I was competing with them to do the same; or worse. So I had to drop down to my knees, I had to surrender. I had to realize that what I really wanted was those who had chosen hate to choose love.
You see, we all do wrong. But we have the capacity to understand that what we did was wrong, to be sorry, and teach our children to do right. If I hate genocide, I have to choose peace. It’s not easy, but that’s the work. That’s what God told me. And when I tried it, I understood why. It liberated me.
So I had gone through the process of anger to peace. But I needed to test myself, to see what I would really feel when I saw this man who had killed my family. What if I really hadn’t forgiven?
When I met him I cried. He walked in swaggering, as if he didn’t care. But I told him, I forgive you, and he covered his face with his hands. I was crying and shaking. I saw that he was a man like many, with a home and a beautiful family, and he had lost it all and was here in prison for a very long time. His skin was bad, his foot was swollen; he wasn’t eating or sleeping well—the consequence of his choices.
My forgiveness didn’t mean I wanted him released from prison. Forgiveness let me out of prison. Forgiveness meant I understood he had the capacity to change. My forgiveness was saying, “I wish you well on your journey. I hope you can understand and regret what you have done and find your own way to peace.” I really just wanted my heart to be able to touch his heart.
When the prison guard saw this, he was really angry at me. He kicked me out. But a year later he came to me and admitted that he had been beating the prisoners because they had killed his five children and his wife. He had given his life to revenge his children and his wife.
But when he saw me forgive the same man, he thought, “Oh my gosh, there is another way. But where do I start?”
He started by no longer beating the prisoners. He couldn’t do it anymore. He started talking to them, trying to understand what had happened to them that they thought they could improve their lives by killing other people.
When he came to me a year later, he was about to get married again. He said he would never have even thought about loving someone again if he hadn’t practiced forgiveness. There had been no room for love in his heart; only anger.
That’s why I wrote about that experience in my book. I want people to know that goodness has its own good fruits, just as hatred has bad fruit.
When you try to do good from your heart, there are blessings that will come from that. That prison guard has six children today.
The MOON: How do you spend your time these days? What is your work?
Immaculée: I am devoting a lot of time to my writing, and I also offer retreats and pilgrimages to holy sites all over the world. The retreats are for people to come and experience healing from whatever traumas they have suffered, so that they can forgive and return to the joy of living. Life is really quite miraculous when we understand the purpose of it—which is to share love and kindness, no matter what.