Murambi Genocide Memorial (warning: could be gruesome)

Yesterday we went to Murambi genocide memorial in Butare district near Burundi. On April 21st, 1994, 50,000 Tutsis who had been hiding in a school for two weeks were killed over the course of 48 hours. The memorial is really unique because some of the survivors came back to the site after the genocide and dug bodies out of one of the mass graves, identified them and laid them out in the classrooms, using lime to preserve them.

We walked through 24 classrooms, each one filled with distorted white figures that were somewhere between bodies and skeletons, and a terrible stench of decay that lingered in my nose for the rest of the day. I had expected that this memorial would bring the reality of the genocide home for me, like it would stop seeming like this distant, horrible thing that scholars have been analyzing for the past fifteen years, and start seeming like, well, a “real genocide,” whatever that is. I wanted to take some time to step out of the analysis of the genocide and appreciate the tragedy of what really happened. But it turned out that the bodies were so surreal and unhuman-looking that it’s still impossible for me to wrap my head around the violence that happened there. Some of the people still had bits of hair or clothes, and often you could make out some sort of facial expression – usually screaming. Some of the most poignant bodies were the ones where you could start to form a story of what happened, like the mother who was trying to shield her screaming baby. But for the most part, they just looked molten and ghastly.

I was more struck by the room that was filled just with skulls lined up, and a big pile of bones. Somehow the scale seemed greater, or maybe more manageable. I don’t know.

The school itself is in the most beautiful place. We were on top of a mountain, surrounded by other mountains, where inhabitants could hear the screaming fifteen years ago. The world was so still up there, silent except for some children on another mountain. When we got to the site, it was sunny and beautiful out, but soon the clouds moved in, and the breeze that felt like rain just made the site all the more calm. There was a tree there that looked almost like a bonsai tree the way the branches were completely flat and reaching out like a carpet of moss, poised on a little trunk. After I went through the memorial I sat under the tree, and there were all these birds that were flying around me, swooping in and out around my face. The world always seems more beautiful after witnessing the macabre and terrible.

I had so much difficulty wrapping my head around what I was seeing there, and I wanted to really understand it and feel all of the sadness and frustration of what happened there, instead of just filing the experience away to try to process slowly, later. I felt like I wasn’t really there, or like I just wasn’t making some crucial connection. I guess because these bodies which hardly even looked like bodies anymore were just faceless representations of people whose stories I can never know. Why is it so hard to feel empathy for people we don’t know? The only way I could really feel like I was relating to what had happened at this site, in the genocide as a whole, was by trying to imagine what it would be like to wait in this cramped classroom, weak and exhausted after two weeks of undernourishment and dehydration, terrified, and then to watch people, maybe people I knew, come and kill the people I loved and know that I was going to be killed and not be able to do anything about it. I had to place the people that I know and care about, the people who bring me joy, into that imagined/real scenario, in order to feel like I was even beginning to understand it.

But then I was really troubled by how challenging I found it to relate to these people, the people whose bodies were right in front of me, the people that actually died. Of course it’s harder to empathize with people you don’t know, but isn’t that part of the tragedy, that you don’t know them and no one else will ever know them? How could it be so easy to retreat into my own concerns and needs so soon after seeing this atrocity? I started to wonder if maybe I’m too selfish to really do humanitarian work or “make a difference.”

And then I started to think about why I was having a hard time empathizing, and I’m not trying to pass on the blame in any way or anything like that, but I do think that part of the problem is that I have spent so much time reading horrible stories and trying to look at conflict so analytically. Not to say that we shouldn’t be analyzing the causes and effects of conflict, because we absolutely should. But after reading so many explanations for how the genocide happened, all the different factors and all the different actors that are “to blame” – it has made the unthinkable thinkable, and I have to wonder if that’s always a good thing. So as I was thinking about the depersonalizing effect of scholarship and academia, I had the “why am I doing this/what is the point of academia?” revelation that I have been expecting this entire trip.

Only a couple of days ago, I was thinking about how strange it was that I hadn’t really had that revelation yet, especially given that it was only a year ago that I felt so frustrated by the Ivory Tower and so much like we should just be focusing our incredible privilege on actually helping people instead of just criticizing other people’s attempts at helping. I was half expecting to come out of this trip not wanting to go back to school and wanting to just stay here and work for an NGO or do something that would feel concrete. So I had been pleasantly surprised to find myself still looking forward to classes and scholarly articles and all that, until now. Not that I’m about to drop out of school, just that I need to think really hard and honestly about why I want to research refugees (and whatever else I do later in life) and what the effect of that research/work could be. Am I interested in refugees just because it’s interesting, or can I actually help them?

Recently I’ve been taking for granted that doing academic research naturally helps the subjects of that research because it raises awareness of their problems and directs attention towards them that otherwise wouldn’t be there. But now I’m questioning that assumption a little more. Especially because I know that NGOs and even more so big organizations like UNHCR are so resistant to change – as one of our guest lecturers in “Aid, Politics and Violence in Africa” said, they do self-analysis, come up with this report and recommendations for how they can do better, and then never look at it again – I have to wonder whether it makes sense to just read/publish reports on the failures of NGOs. Right now, I definitely think I want to do some sort of “concrete” work after graduation.

So that was my (very self-centered) conclusion/series of thoughts following my observation of how self-centered I am. At least I’m consistent.