Africa, a lost continent, is an unheard of. When Western colonists destroyed thousands of tribes with firearms in hand, they clamoured that this was the baptism of civilization.
But they never imagined that in 1994, a country in Africa that seemed to practice a "democratic" system, millions of people died overnight under the butcher's knife, becoming unburied souls.
At this time, where is the brilliance of "civilization", where is the superiority of "democracy", or is this "civilization" cloaked in barbarism, "democracy" is a clown in a mask, and behind it is colonialism and racism that have been rooted for a long time.
Rwanda in the Land of Tears
"There are corpses everywhere, there is no way to recycle, and there are many dogs walking around among the carcasses, patrolling for food. The barking of dogs and the smell of carrion enter the brain from the ears and noses, and we witness mass carnage, but we can only stand idly by. ”
This is how Canadian Romeo Daller felt about the Rwandan genocide in 1994, when he was the commander of the United Nations peacekeeping force in Rwanda, but was not instructed by his superiors to interfere in Rwanda's internal affairs and could only watch from the sidelines.
Antoinette, one of the Rwandan genocide survivors, choked up when she faced the camera: "The bodies were fed to the dogs, and the dogs ate the bodies. ”
As she spoke, she unconsciously wiped the tears that flowed with her hands, and then continued:
"I sat there, terrified. I knew that if they saw me, they would bite me. I thought, I was terrified. A woman with an infant child showed them her identity card, and then they waved their machetes and cut off the woman's head cleanly. Her child was still lying on her body to feed. I broke down and didn't dare to take the child away..."
At this point, Antoinette picked up the tissue next to her and wiped her tears.
Antoinette, originally Tutsi, was only 14 years old in 1994, and because she was not old enough to apply for an identity card, she followed her father's advice and hid in the bushes alone, which luckily survived and became a storyteller of history.
"At first, we were a little cowering at killing, but over time, we got used to it. Some colleagues have asked someone to teach them the exact way to cut someone: cut it from the side of the neck or the back of the head, which can be done quickly. But there are also colleagues who are not very skilled until the end. They don't dare, so the movements are slow. For example, they did not dare to cut their necks, so they cut off their arms, and then shouted as they ran: Okay, okay, I'll kill him. But everyone knows otherwise. So they will come to a professional person, catch up with the target and kill him. ”
This is a confession from Alphonse, let's call it the executioner, who was only eighteen years old at the time of the Holocaust and had the blood of others on his hands.
But his life was later destroyed, and because he could not bear the torment of the crimes he committed that day, he eventually became insane and panicked.
For either side, this unprecedented massacre is a nightmare that will never be erased.
Their lives seem to have stopped in 1994, and they have been torn in the cycle of massacre.
According to United Nations statistics, about 800,000 people were brutally killed. However, according to the estimates of historians and locals, the death toll is likely to exceed the million.
It is hard to imagine that after World War II, there were still countries that carried out genocide at home with impunity. Such barbaric killings are a challenge to all mankind and question everyone's conscience.
The ins and outs of the massacre
On 6 April 1994, the President of Rwanda, Habil, a Hutu, was on his way home from a plane when he was attacked by surprise.
As the plane sailed along the airport runway, everyone cheered, thinking that it could land smoothly, when a homemade bomb whizzed past and accurately hit the presidential plane, killing the president and crew.
The death of the president, like the killing of the Grand Duke of Austria-Hungary with a pistol by Principe on the eve of the same war, was the trigger for war.
For a moment, the situation in Rwanda was raging, and everyone's eyes were full of fear and worry, but no one expected that the consequences would be so terrible.
The plane crash cast a haze over Rwanda, and a few hours later, a genocide against ethnic Tutsis followed.
The Hutu army set up checkpoints around the country to check the identity cards of passing citizens, and when they saw Tutsis, they couldn't help but say that they were hacked to death with knives regardless of age, men and women.
The pins of time point to April 12, when Hutu government forces drove 150,000 Tutsis into an open field the size of only three football fields.
The football field is very large, and three seems to be a lot, but in front of the number of 150,000, it can only be a small witch.
The Tutsis are all shoulder to shoulder, feet to foot, and the younger children are either lying in their mother's arms or riding on their father's shoulders.
Sixty hours later, Hutu government forces, ordered to massacre, began shelling the crowd with shells, throwing grenades at crowded areas.
The angry Tutsi were also not willing to sit still, picking up stones and throwing them at the government troops, but there was no doubt that this was touching the stone with an egg, and it could only be shattered with one blow.
The Hutu not only used government forces, but also incited the Hutu underclass, of which Alphonse was a part.
At only eighteen years old, he was a typical stunned young man, blindly obeyed the government's call, so he took the machete at home and took to the street, aiming at women and children...
The bewitched Hutu people like Alphonse are not a minority, but the main force in the massacre.
They have little education, no independent judgment, and nine times out of ten, they are illiterate.
Hutu people with a little conscience, even if they did not want to participate in it, were also accused by the government army as accomplices.
In the Holocaust, there is no second way, either to be killed, or to kill, or to be an enemy or a partner.
Of course, most of the executioners were real devils, and some 250,000 Tutsi women were raped by Hutu, some were even forced into sex slavery, and gave birth to children known as "war gestation".
One such mother is Muhaimana, who was unfortunately arrested on 7 April while visiting relatives in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, and then violated by Hutu.
Muhaimana suffered three years of humiliation and gave birth to a boy.
She clearly remembers the moment the child was born, she kept crying, wishing that she would die early and let her soul disappear.
After that, Muhaimana's life was also difficult, alone, with children, and had to endure the white eyes and ridicule of others.
Even more tragic, after three years of abuse, she contracted AIDS, and when the child reached the age of 13, Muhaimana died.
In short, in the Rwandan genocide, these executioners felt madness and enjoyed pleasure, but at the same time lost humanity and returned to barbarism completely.
The most primitive bestiality of mankind is constantly awakened by the screams of the Tutsi and eventually becomes a slave to anger. For more than 100 days, 1 million people lost their breath and their hearts stopped.
On average, 10,000 people were killed every day, a rate that exceeded the infamous Nazi massacre of World War II.
Four million people were left homeless and 2 million fled abroad, creating the rarest catastrophe since World War II.
The cause of the tragedy
Western countries, which have always prided themselves on civilization, fell silent after the massacre.
The peacekeeping force composed of soldiers from Belgium, France, Italy and the United States ran away with a bucket of smoke in an instant, as if they could not see the human tragedy in front of them.
Even at the United Nations discussion conference, some countries proposed to send peacekeeping troops to Rwanda, but the United States opposed the deployment of troops on the grounds of "security".
Of course, the United States opposes sending troops, and one of the reasons is that in the recent Somali pirates, American peacekeepers were raided by pirates and suffered heavy losses, and Ridley Scott's "Black Hawk Down" is a movie based on this historical event.
The rise of isolationism at home and the boiling grievances have made the U.S. government afraid to send peacekeeping troops for a foreign civil strife.
For the United States, it is a phrase, "it does not concern itself and hangs high."
For Belgium, France, Germany and other Western European countries, the root cause of Rwanda's tragic outbreak was traditional Western colonialism. Who has ever seen the perpetrator take the initiative to take responsibility? If you don't add fuel to the fire, making a profit from it is already worshipping Buddha and burning incense.
For example, French arms companies have secretly provided ammunition to the Hutu to help them cause abuse.
On the surface, this is a long-standing ethnic hatred between the Hutu and Tutsi, but it is not clear that these two peoples were completely constructed by Western colonizers, and are not natural peoples in Rwanda.
In the mid-19th century, the tentacles of European colonialism extended to the Great Lakes region of Africa, which is now Congo and Rwanda.
The British colonist Speke traveled around Africa and proposed that the Wahuma people in the region were "semi-semites-Hamit", whose ancestors were herders from Ethiopia, and the indigenous groups were "inferior peoples", and should be ruled and managed by European masters.
In order to justify themselves, the colonists also used the Old Testament saying that he was cursed by God for offending his father, Noah, and his offspring had an ugly black skin.
By 1884, the colonizers had accelerated their colonial pace, and the European powers met in Berlin on the theme of carving up their spheres of influence in Africa.
Since then, Rwanda has become an overseas colony of Germany, and according to the so-called "Hammit" hypothesis, ethnic divisions have been established, and the Hutu and Tutsi have been born.
The method of German colonialist rule was to pull one faction and fight one faction, and originally under a long period of ethnic immersion, the Hutu and Tutsi were at odds.
Germany also strongly supported the Tutsi side, annexing many small Hutu tribes.
After the end of World War I, Germany completely lost its overseas colonies, but the disaster in Rwanda did not end there.
A lama walked, a monk came, and Belgium took over Rwanda and implemented a strict identity system.
In order to distinguish between different ethnic groups, Belgium uses the guise of science to identify them in a biological way.
They "discovered" that the noses of Tutsis were on average 2.5 mm longer and 5 mm thinner than those of Hutu. Therefore, the Belgian "scientists" concluded that the Tutsi were superior, in fact, to put it bluntly, it was more in line with the mainstream European aesthetics, and they had to decorate it to fool others.
In this way, the national self-esteem of the Hutu people was greatly damaged.
The Belgian colonizers not only roughly divided the criteria of nationality, but also suppressed the Hutu economically.
In 1926, the Belgian Charles Vazin enacted the Reform Law, which resulted in the colonial government being exclusively Tutsi and stipulated that Hutu people could only engage in hard labor, including building roads and growing coffee. Educationally, most schools in Rwanda also admit only the children of the Tutsi elite, and turn out Hutu.
Multiple discriminatory policies have made the Hutu people resentful, planting the seeds of hatred in the hearts of the Hutu people, only to wait for a certain moment of the day, the long-suppressed hatred will spew out like a volcanic accumulation of magma.
World War II was an opportunity to upend Rwanda's political power.
After World War II, national liberation movements surged around the world, and Rwanda followed suit and freed itself from Belgian rule.
In 1962, Rwanda was officially established and the Hutu took power.
Due to the long period of unfair treatment and the mentality of revenge, the Hutu regime also adopted a state policy of discrimination against the Tutsi people, falling into an endless cycle of "endless retribution for wrongs".
If Rwanda had only two political forces, there would not have been subsequent massacres.
At this time, a monk walked, and another bald donkey came, that is, France.
France is a country with a strong colonial complex, not only in Rwanda in Africa, but also in Vietnam in Asia, which helped South Vietnam attack the North Vietnamese government.
France continues to exert political pressure on Rwanda while imposing Western-style "liberal democracy" on the other.
Under various measures, the contradictions between the Hutu and Tutsis were exacerbated.
In October 1990, the Rwandan Patriotic Front, a French-backed Tutsi attack, attacked from neighboring countries, and the Rwandan civil war broke out.
The war lasted for 3 years, and the two sides were at odds with each other, and they wanted to stop there and sign a contract. The hard-line Hutu forces, who had never thought about it, violently undermined the signing process.
By 1994, the plane crash of Hutu President Haberiama became a "legitimate excuse" for the massacre.
When the powder keg is ignited by popular anger, it will affect the entire Rwandan people.
The Presidential Guard prepares a pre-drawn list of personnel, captures them and shoots them on the spot.
Hutu radicals took control of the radio and called on all Hutu people to take up arms and exterminate the Tutsis, and the massacre broke out.
Epilogue:
Although the ethnic antagonism in the Holocaust cannot be entirely attributed to the Western colonizers, it is the obvious fact that it is the Western countries that roughly divide the composition of the nation for their own interests, encouraging one faction to attack the other.
Just like the catalyst of a chemical reaction or the various conditions that trigger the reaction, it undoubtedly exacerbates the antagonism between races and eventually leads to a tragic outbreak.
It was not until 2021 that French President Emmanuel Macron acknowledged responsibility for the Rwandan massacre in his speech, saying: "Through various studies and the efforts of historians, France's role in the massacre was learned and politically responsible... France has been silent for too long in examining the facts. ”
But I don't know when Germany and Belgium will be able to reflect on their past like France, I am afraid that it can only be a distant future.
Resources:
"Neighbor to the Butcher Knife" by Jean Hartsfeld, Beijing Daily Publishing House
"God Forgot Rwanda" documentary
"Colonial Rule Buried the Bane of the Rwandan Genocide" Historical Context