she caught me by surprise, Rwanda,
and not only me. for the past three years,she has held me in her grip. |
early on the morning of April
7, 1994, I
was awakened by an urgent phone call from the newsroom. "a small plane carrying the
presidents of Burundi and Rwanda has crashed. they are both dead". few people knew then, that the downing of
that plane and the elimination of the Rwandan president was the pre-arranged signal to
begin a very carefully planned genocide, which, by the time of the phone call was already
in progress. at the beginning, in the first hours of April
6th, almost nobody noticed the drama unfolding in Rwanda. and when we finally did notice,
as usual, it was too late. you enter a simple prayer house, on the
outskirts of a small village drowned in greenery; on the red-brick church walls are images
of the crucifixion and the Holy Mother. they look down on thousands of bodies - women, old
people, children... many children and infants. yet, someone, did this. not in a flash of
madness, but in a planned and well thought-out move. the hate, that brought the killers to
raise their knifes, to rape the victims before the slaughter, to kill without
discrimination even the babies, to riddle the churches with bullets, to throw in grenades,
to massacre with hands, stones, bars, anyone who tried to escape... Rwanda has managed to confuse almost all we
thought we already knew. she implies a constant nightmare to the few who remember her on
regular days, and a bright warning signal to everyone who thought we had already learned,
that we succeeded, in assuring, 'never again'. all this happened not so far from here, on a
clear blue spring day, in a beautiful, fertile land, where nobody had ever starved. the few photos you see here, depict only the
surface of the Rwandan tragedy and are the humble way I choose to share with you what I
have witnessed - maybe a small act of prayer, that we will never again witness such a
horror. |
Erez T. Yanuv Jerusalem, April 1997 |