Coming to light 30 years after Rwanda horror

Michael Andisile Mayalo|Published 5 months ago

Franco-Rwandan writer Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse has written a book, The Convoy, about how about 1 000 children were rescued from Rwanda during the bloodiest and most chaotic days of its genocide three decades after the slaughter. Picture: JULIEN DE ROSA AFP

Lucie PEYTERMANN

Pictures by Joel Saget and Guillem Sartorio

Jeanne Allaire Kayigirwa was sure she was going to die three times during the Rwandan genocide in which most of her friends and family were massacred.

She and her sister hid in the bush for six weeks as the slaughter went on around them, moving all the time as Hutu extremists hunted Tutsis like them “down with dogs”.

“I don’t know how we survived,” she said.

Jeanne Allaire Kayigirwa outside her mother’s house in Kigali in July. Kayigirwa survived the genocide against the Tutsi in 1994 when she was 16 years old. She lost her father during the genocide and many other relatives. She moved to France where she, becoming involved in Ibuka, a genocide survivors’ group. Last year she returned to live in Rwanda, with her husband and son. Picture: Guillem Sartorio AFP

Much about that time she does not want to remember. “Otherwise I won’t be able to go on.”

Kayigirwa learned to live with her demons, but “you cannot wipe a genocide from your memory. It comes back went it wants”.

Then one day she took stock. “Am I going to let the killers who wanted to wipe me out also take my second life? Or am I going to live it?” said the 46-year-old, who went on to be a top local government official in Paris.

It is 30 years since more than a million people were killed in the genocide organised by the extremist Hutu regime in 1994.

Men, women, children from the Tutsi minority systematically exterminated between April and July 1994 ‒ often with machetes ‒ by Hutu forces, sometimes even by their friends, neighbours and colleagues.

The Rwandan authorities only allowed children under 12 to be transported on the packed convoys run by the Swiss charity Terre des hommes (People of the Earth).

“Terre des hommes found itself facing an unbelievable situation,” said Jean-Luc Imhof, a longtime Rwanda specialist for the charity.

They “were responsible for more than 1 000 of these children”, and with war and the genocide raging all around, the situation was completely “chaotic”, he said.

“Lots were really young, some under three years old, but mostly there were between five and 10. Many had been wounded, including with machetes,” he said.

As the Tutsi rebels from the Rwandan Patriotic Front (FPR) ‒ who put an end to the massacres ‒ closed in, the army and the Hutu-led Interahamwe militia sensed defeat and “became crazy”, he said.

These were deeply traumatised children who had “seen their families massacred” and “taken their trauma with them”.

“Their normal had become escaping death multiple times a day,” he said,

Three decades after the horror, AFP set out to find Tutsi children who survived the killing and were adopted or grew up in France.

They talked of the weight of what they witnessed, their feeling of injustice and about living for those who were slaughtered.

Some have remained abroad, while others have been drawn back to Rwanda.

Kayigirwa lost her father, sister, friends, cousins, aunts and uncles ‒ “I try not to count”.

“They put the guns to our temples the day they came to kill us,” she said.

Moving to France “gave me the chance to study”, but more than anything it “helped me because I didn’t have to see the killers every day”.

Soon after arriving, Kayigirwa helped found the Ibuka group, a survivor group which keeps the memory of the genocide alive, going to schools to speak about what happened.

Kayigirwa began a family and worked for the mayor of Paris.

“I feel that by talking about it I am not shutting up the dead who have been silenced.”

Manzi Rugirangoga at the French cultural centre where he works in Kigali in May this year. Rugirangoga survived the genocide against the Tutsi in 1994 when he was only 1 year old. He lost his mother and dozens of family members. He was secreted to Burundi and was later raised in France by his father. But he felt the ‘need’ to return to live in Rwanda and reconnect with his country where he currently lives and works. Picture: Guillem Sartorio AFP

A heavy silence, however, hung over Manzi Rugirangoga’s childhood.

Now living back in the Rwandan capital Kigali, Rugirangoga survived the unthinkable as a baby.

He was just 15 months old when his family took refuge in a school with other Tutsis in the southern town of Butare. On April 29, 1994, Hutu militia attacked. His mother, who was carrying him on her back, was killed along with his aunt and uncle.

He and his sister and brother, who were four and seven, were not: “The killers didn’t spare us, they just said they didn’t want to waste their bullets on us.” Instead they were left to “die from hunger and grief”.

Rugirangoga’s father found him in an orphanage in Burundi three months later.

The extraordinary rescue operation by Terre des hommes only came to light recently thanks to a book called The Convoy by Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse, one of 1 000 survivors its aid workers got out of the country.

“Dozens of members of my family” were killed in the genocide, said Rugirangoga, now 31.

“My father is the only survivor on his side.” A vet, he was in France on a training course when the genocide began.

He brought the children to France “because he had very little hope of finding anything in Rwanda. I still feel this huge feeling of injustice about what happened,” said Rugirangoga.

Little was ever said at home. “People would ask you where you came from, and I knew very little.”

It was only after the “shock” of returning to Rwanda for the first time when he was 10 that he felt “an instinctive need” to go home.

“I finally knew where I came from,” he said.

After some difficult teenage years, Rugirangoga went back to Kigali on his own when he was 15 to stay with his aunt, and then boarded at high school in the east of the country, where he had to learn Rwandan.

He returned to France to study and returned to Kigali once he had completed university.

“Back then, I didn’t see my future in France,” he said.

Women sit and comfort each other by a mass grave at Nyanza Genocide Memorial Centre in Kigali in April 2024. Rwanda on April 7, 2024 paid solemn tribute to genocide victims, 30 years after a vicious campaign orchestrated by Hutu extremists tore apart the country, as neighbours turned on each other in one of the bloodiest massacres of the 20th century. The killing spree, which lasted 100 days before the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) rebel militia took Kigali in July 1994, claimed the lives of about 800 000 people, largely Tutsis but also moderate Hutus. Picture: Guillem Sartorio AFP

Claire Umutoni and one of her sisters got to Burundi on a July 3 convoy in an escape she still remembers vividly.

“We received a phone call on about April 20 from someone whose voice my father recognised. He knew it was one of the dignitaries from the town of Butare, who told him: ‘Your time has come’."

He ordered his five daughters to flee and Umutoni, then 17, suddenly became head of her family, the sisters chased from one hiding place to the next.

Orphan and survivor of the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, Claire Umutoni, in August. The untold story of how about 1 000 children were rescued from Rwanda during the bloodiest and most chaotic days of its genocide is finally coming to light three decades after they were saved from the slaughter. Claire Umutoni, 47, became an orphan at 17 when both her parents were killed in the genocide that targeted the Tutsi minority in Rwanda in 1994, a mass slaughter orchestrated by Hutu extremists. With her four little sisters, she was saved and exfiltrated from Rwanda to Burundi by a humanitarian convoy. She built a new life in Canada and is involved in the memorial work to remember the victims of the genocide. Picture: BERTRAND GUAY AFP

Their parents were later murdered with “unimaginable cruelty”, she said.

“Bombs were falling near the school where we were staying with several orphans ‒ the children had all sorts of injuries, both physical and emotional. It was terrible,” Umutoni told AFP from her home in Canada.

The terror only intensified when they joined the rescue convoy.

“I remember that on the road, there were many of the killers who had carried out genocide fleeing with hammers and machetes... It was chaos because the FPR was at the gates of Butare, but there were still perpetrators who wanted to kill the Tutsis,” said Umutoni.

She and her sisters made it out and were eventually taken in by their aunts.

Her aunt sent her to Canada in 1999 “to start a new life, to start over. And I chose not to spiral into madness,” said Umutoni, who now works in Canada’s Privy Council Office and is a mother to “three beautiful children”.

She returned to Rwanda for the first time in 2008 to bury her parents, who had finally been identified.

When she left for France, Kayigirwa thought she was also "leaving the genocide" behind her.

"I thought I was going to live a good life, I hoped to never have to see the images of the bones and the ruins. But even if you move 6 000km, you bring the genocide with you," she said.

She described how it followed her down French streets where she would notice “spots where people might be able to hide”.

“The nightmares have lasted a long time,” she said.

Rwandan-born French Gaspard Jassef shows a photograph of him with his adoptive mother Dominique Jassef taken on June 21, 1995, when he arrived at a French airport after his adoption, during a photo session in Paris, in June. Jassef lost his mother and sister when he was a child during the genocide that affected the Tutsi minority in Rwanda in 1994. He also lost his father and was orphaned in Rwanda. He was adopted in 1995 in France, where he has been trying to rebuild his life for 30 years. Picture: JOEL SAGET AFP

Gaspard Jassef’s memories would not leave him alone either. As a 6-year-old, he hid alone in the forest for five months.

“The commemoration of the 30 years (since the genocide) touched me intensely... and I want to sort out of all the unknowns in my head about what happened to me,” he told AFP in a Paris cafe.

His little sister and his mother ‒ a Tutsi married to a Hutu ‒ were poisoned by their Hutu relatives at the start of the genocide.

Fearful for his “mixed” child, his father told him to hide in the forest. But he never came to find him. He too had been killed, according to information Jassef has been able to piece together.

In October 1994 ‒ three months after the genocide ended ‒ a French nurse called Dominique Jassef, who had been working in a local dispensary, found him in the forest with advanced malnutrition. “I ate what I could. I hunted small animals. I stayed in the trees,” he said.

“When my second mother found me, I probably had a week to live,” he said. The doctors thought “there was no hope” but the French nurse refused to give up on him, got him treatment and later adopted him, changing his life.

Jassef still has trouble sleeping and is haunted by the day when he had to bury his mother and his sister.

But in “my sadness I have had the great good luck to have had two very loving mothers”, he added.

Despite the trauma, he was a brilliant student and worked for several years for a think tank and co-founded the support group, The Adopted of Rwanda.

Even so, “everyday life can be a struggle, and sometimes I feel very old”, he admitted.

A commission of historians in 2021 found that France under the late president Francois Mitterrand had “heavy and overwhelming responsibility” for the genocide but had not been complicit.

The writer Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse makes a distinction between “the absolutely fantastic French people who welcomed her” and “the French politicians and military whose actions should be condemned”.

Despite the trauma, she was able to “reconstruct” her life. “Of course, you feel fragile. When you have been excluded from humanity... it’s a long road back from that,” she said.

She chose a career where she “fights against death”, working for NGOs dealing with Aids and addiction.

Last year Jeanne moved back to Rwanda with her husband and young son.

“I felt I was missing something in France,| she told AFP from Kigali. ”I wanted to live with my family and my mother again. She is now over 80. I wanted to show my son my homeland and my language and maybe help rebuild the country.“

Jassef said he has finally found a “form of stability” and wants to go back to his village and understand what happened to his father.

Rugirangoga has a heap of projects on the go in Kigali. He has written an “African futurist” novel, founded a publishing house and has invested in farms growing peppers, beans and watermelons.

“Reconnecting with my roots, my family and my history has helped me,” he said.

But “the idea that we can totally reconstruct ourselves, and that we don’t think about what happened, that is unobtainable.”

AFP