A Different View with Dave O’Connell

The shy child was now a woman with a voice that she demands will be heard for the rest of her days, but her photograph in the papers last week brought me right back to the place I’d first met her – and it was in the ashes of the pits of hell.

Because Josiane Umumarashavu is from Rwanda – and when she was just twelve years old, she was the face on the front of the Trócaire Lent box, back in 2004.

Almost a decade earlier, Josiane had lost almost everything and everyone she knew in the genocide that, despite the barbarism we’ve seen in so many places before and since, still ranks among the darkest days in the history of the planet.

Because over just 100 days – between April and July in 1994 – over 800,000 people were butchered while the world stood idly by.

This most beautiful country – the land of a thousand hills, home to gorillas in the mist – had a long-running undercurrent of tension between the Hutus, who were much larger in number but poorer in wealth, and the Tutsis, who were fewer but richer.

But these were not two tribes from different ethnic backgrounds – they were simply the respective inhabitants of pre-colonial kingdoms before the arrival of the Belgians.

And – in a genocide triggered by the death in a plane crash of the country’s President Juvénal Habyarimana – the Hutus attacked their neighbours (and sometimes their own families) because they believed the Tutsis were ‘cockroaches’ who had to die.

Josiane was just three when her father, sister and two brothers were butchered, and she had to flee her home. She remembered little and yet vividly recalled a crying for a doll she’d had to leave behind.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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