Remembering genocide.

Byline: Paul Neville The Register-Guard

I am haunted by that craggy, misty and most sorrowful of places called Bisesero.

Weeks go by, even months, and I am free of memories of the stark, steep region in the remote province of Kibuye on the westernmost edge of the tiny central African nation of Rwanda.

Then I hear a snippet on National Public Radio or see a headline in The New York Times. And I remember the mountain of bones - all that was left of the tens of thousands of Tutsi men, women and children who fled to this high country in the final days of the genocide of 1994.

It was there at Bisesero that a desperate, starving Tutsi remnant, armed only with stones and clubs, hid in the caves and ravines. It was there at Bisesero that these men, women and children waged a final, futile resistance against the Interhamwe, the Hutu death squads that arrived by busloads and stalked their former neighbors, co-workers and countrymen with machetes, pistols and grenades. It was there at Bisesero that the innocent victims waited, hoping in vain that the rest of the world would intervene and rescue them from the same extermination that had killed a million of their fellow Tutsis, nearly one-tenth of the country's population.

Four years ago, Register-Guard photographer Nicole DeVito and I traveled to Bisesero, where we were among the first outsiders to see a new mountainside memorial that the then-new Tutsi government was building to honor those who resisted and died there.

We watched with stunned disbelief as Ngarambe Vedaste, the monument's designer and an officer in the rebel army of Tutsi expatriates that had ousted the Hutu government, pulled back a tarpaulin to show us a portion of the vast mound of human remains that included, Vedaste told us in steady, unemotional tones, the nearly 300 members of his extended family who had lived in the villages of Bisesero. Of that family, not one person was spared.

I want to forget what I saw that day - the tangle of shattered skulls, jawbones, hip bones, ribs, spinal columns, tendons and moldering remnants of shirts, trousers and shoes - but I cannot, and I should not.

"Never forget what happened here - never," Vedaste told me. His admonition was unnecessary. No one who saw what happened in Rwanda's genocide can forget, even if they wanted. Neither should the world be able to forget, though it seems that the memory of the genocide in Rwanda is already fading for many here in the United States, a nation that should reflect on its role, even its complicity, in the events that unfolded in that tiny, faraway African nation.

I remembered Bisesero earlier this month when an international court in Arusha, Tanzania, convicted three Rwandan news media executives of genocide for helping to incite and direct the Interhamwe. The court found that the three men - Ferdinand Nahimana and Jean-Bosco Barayagwiza, founders of a radio station dubbed "Vampire Radio," and Hassan Ngese, editor of a Rwandan newspaper - had systematically inflamed the ethnic hatred that enabled the Hutu government to annihilate much of the Tutsi population.

John Floyd, a lawyer for the defendants, denounced the tribunal's verdict as a setback for free speech and a precedent that authoritarian governments across the world could use to justify shutting down media outlets. "This is a terrible, terrible decision, the worst decision in the history of international justice," Floyd said. "This case," he added, "would have been laughed out of an American court."

As a supporter of a robust and free press across the world, I might have been persuaded by Floyd's comments if I hadn't seen for myself what happened in Rwanda and spent time with both Hutus and Tutsis who lived through the genocide.

The reality is that the Hutu government used both the newspaper and the radio station, not as legitimate media outlets in any sense, but as blunt instruments of death. The radio station, in particular, was infamous, with its broadcasts guiding the death squads to specific victims, broadcasting the names, addresses, hiding places - even the license plate numbers - of Tutsi fugitives. Its broadcasters exhorted the killers to complete their genocidal work, and it referred to the Tutsi prey as "snakes" and "cockroaches."

I remembered Bisesero again last March, when the same tribunal convicted Pastor Elizaphan Ntakirutimana, the former head of the Seventh-day Adventist Church in Rwanda, and his son, Gerard, a doctor, of assisting in the genocide. The court said the two coordinated the massacre of an estimated 2,000 men, women and children who had sought safety in an Adventist medical complex in the hillside village of Mugonero.

During our trip to Rwanda, we spent several days in Mugonero, visiting an orphanage filled with children of the victims of the genocide. We stayed in a small brick apartment overlooking the hospital compound where a rough field with a smattering of bushes and wildflowers contains the bodies of the victims. The field is surrounded by a tall wall of red brick on which these words were painted in large block letters, both in English and in Kinyarwandan: "Innocent victims of April 1994 genocide."

One night after dinner in the home of the pastor who directed the orphanage, an elderly woman told us that she had worked as a nurse at the hospital. She said the elder Ntakirutimana, knowing she was half Belgian, had warned her to leave before the death squads came. She described how every one of her Tutsi co-workers was massacred in a slaughter that took the death squads a full day to complete. And she told us how Pastor Ntakirutimana had prayed in his hilltop church that God strengthen the hands of the killers and then descended to the hospital to join in the slaughter.

The tribunal also convicted the Ntakirutimanas of organizing attacks at nearby Bisesero, where they actually transported the Hutu death squads to the mountainous region where they hunted Tutsis, including Vedaste's relatives, like wild game.

I also remembered Bisesero recently when I read about an eerily precise Rwandan government census that concluded that 1,074,017 innocent people were killed within the 100-day genocide. That means an average of slightly more than 10,000 people were killed every day, as the rest of the world stood by for more than three months - a killing rate more than six times that of the Nazi death camps.

Reflect for a moment: More than 1 million human beings were slaughtered in three months. In a world that prides itself on embracing the post-Holocaust admonition: "Never Again." Remember that the Clinton administration knew enough about planning for the genocide that it, along with the United Nations, could have stopped the killing with what military experts agreed at the time could have been a minimal force. Remember that the United States, again under the Clinton administration, pushed for the removal of most of the U.N. peacekeepers who were already in Rwanda and worked to block efforts in the United Nations to send reinforcements. Remember that the United States refused even to make available its technical capabilities to jam the radio broadcasts that were helping to coordinate and fuel the fires of the genocide.

Remember also that, despite their full awareness of the insane slaughter that was under way, U.S. officials refused to use the term "genocide" to avoid triggering treaty obligations that would have required intervention. The cravenly political reason: a fear of repeating what happened in Somalia, where 18 U.S. servicemen were killed in a humanitarian mission.

So it is that I am still haunted by the craggy, misty place called Bisesero, where a Rwandan named Ngarambe Vedaste stood by the mountain of bones and told me that they belonged to his people - a people who believed that if they could resist long enough and fight hard enough, that the world would come to their rescue and they would survive.

"But that was not true," Vedaste said. "Not in this place."

Paul Neville is an associate editor of The Register-Guard. He visited Rwanda four years ago to report on Brownsville resident Winnie Barron's search for an orphan whose life she had helped save during the 1994 genocide and civil war.

CAPTION(S):

Ngarambe Vedaste lost 300 members of his extended family in the butchery at Bisesero, Rwanda. "Never forget what happened here - never," said the Tutsi soldier, who designed the mountainside memorial that now honors the men, women and children who resisted and died there. The Resistance Memorial looks out across the high country of Bisesero, where in 1994 tens of thousands of Tutsis sought refuge in vain.