Thursday was Holocaust Remembrance Day, where in Israel sirens go off all over the country at noon. My first effort at a novel, now comfortably in a drawer, featured a teen stoner who, when told about it, says "If they had that here, you'd have sirens going off all the time." Even so, I think it's vital to keep sounding notes, audible and perhaps singular, when the rest of our lives is full of such noise.
The few mentions of Yam Hashoah that I did see also made the tenuous and real connection to Darfur - a subject I've not written about, for fear of over-simplifying, or simply adding to the noise. But it also feels, just as with torture, like complicity if I say nothing at all; so I kept my notebook close to hand when I went last week to hear Dina Temple-Ralston read from her book Justice on the Grass.
The room at the Chelsea Barnes&Noble was jammed, far more than I expected: all there to hear about Rwanda -- hardly most people's idea of a fun night out. These were people for whom, for one reason or another, the tenth anniversary of the genocide in Rwanda was vitally important. Perhaps they'd seen either Hotel Rwanda or Sometime in April; perhaps they'd read Philip Gourevitch's iconic We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families, or the excerpt from John Hatzfield's upcoming Machete Season, just published in Harper's, which included the following testimony from one of the army of perpetrators:
Some offenders claim that we changed into wild animals, that we were blinded by ferocity, that we buried our civilization under branches, and that's why we are unable to find the right words to talk properly about it.
That is a trick to sidetrack the truth. I can say this: outside the marshes, our lives seemed quite ordinary. We sang on the paths, we downed some beer, we had our choice amid abundance. We chatted about our good fortune, we soaped off our bloodstains in the basin, and our noses enjoyed the aromas of full cooking pots. We rejoiced in the new life about to begin by feasting on leg of veal. We were hot at night atop our wives, and we scolded our rowdy children. Although no longer willing to feel pity, we were still greedy for good feelings.
The days all seemed much alike. We put on our field clothes. We swapped gossip, we made bets on our victims, spoke mockingly of cut girls, squabbled foolishly over looted grain. We sharpened our tools on whetting stones. We traded stories about desperate Tutsi tricks, we made fun of every "Mercy!" cried by someone hunted down, we counted up and stashed away our goods.
We went about all sorts of human business without a care in the world—provided we concentrated on killing during the day, naturally.
At the end of that season in the marshes, we were so disappointed that we had failed. We were disheartened by what we would lose, and truly frightened by the misfortune and vengeance reaching out for us. But deep down, we weren't tired of anything.
Ralston, now city editor of the New York Sun, has written a narrative of Rwanda far different from the novelistic and influential Philip Gourevitch text (which I teach from when I want to demonstrate the concept of lyricism in nonfiction narratives) yet far more like it than Hatzfield's impassive interviewing. Ralston spends equal time with victim-survivors and with the other survivors, those involved both in major and minor ways with the deaths of 800,000 people -- like the ones quoted above as well as the trials of journalists who crossed the line and used their outlets to inflame the crowds. Lke Gourevitch, like Dr. Sheri Fink writing about Srebrenica, she draws sharp portraits of the latter in describing how the latter intentionally twisted history:
It is easy to underestimate the damage historical confusion can wreak. For that reason Rwanda needed responsible academics to help set the record straight. University of Rwanda history professor Ferdinand Nahimana believed he was the man to do just that. Born in 1950 to a farming family, Nahimana was the youngest of nine children. He managed to get an education in spite of the fact that he was poor and Hutu. He even received a doctorate in France, where his study of Hutu history was lauded as a step toward helping peace return to his country.
A slender man with a wide forehead and sympathetic eyes, Nahimana spoke in the soft, even tones of an intellectual. He saw no need to raise his voice. Some said his gentle demeanor belied the turmoil that raged inside him. People said that he secretly harbored hatred of the Tutsi and he had come to the conclusion that a history needed to be written that extolled the virtue of the majority people, the Hutu. Nahimana had focused his research on what he perceived were the overlooked contributions the Hutu had made to Rwandan culture.
Nahimana's "new history" was a rejection of an inherited body of understandings that could be traced back to [Belgian eugenicist, who theorised the Tutsi were "European"] Speke's writings from the Mountains of the Moon. Nahimana felt the Tutsi were not just wrongheaded about their perceived right to pull the levers of power in Rwanda; they were a natural enemy of the Hutu majority. Anything that provided a boost to the Tutsi came at the expense of the Hutu, he said. The Tutsi had no right to rule. Their goal was to return Rwanda to its days as a monarchy. Nahimana had taken his theory to the University of Paris in 1986 and written a dissertation on the Hutu kingdoms of northwest Rwanda. His professor, Jean-Paul Chrétien, awarded him the highest honors for "demystifying Rwandan history."
Such willful distortion became fact to millions of Rwandans (putting me in mind of Chris Hedges' comments , in War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning , on"ancient hatreds" that are enhanced and fed by not-so-ancient power struggles.) Nahimana goes on to found RTLM, the radio station that directed the genocidaires. (The comment by the French professor a brisk reminder that as much as we decry the Clinton Administration's inaction on Rwanda, France has had a longer history of abetting one side or the other -- including helping hundreds of perpetrators escape into Congo, after the events of April 1994). About that inaction in 1994: Ralston pointed out, during the Q&A, that "They killed 800,000 in 100 days. How long do you think it takes to equip and deploy an invasion force? Nearly sixty."
Not to mention the slow politics of decisionmaking, which I thought we were watching this year on Darfur -- despite the efforts of an odd but seemingly potent combination of usual suspect activists and evangelical Christians. Though I was mindful of what Temple-Ralston also mentioned that day: that by using the word "genocide" and not acting immediately, the profound if limited power of the word, in an international context, has been badly depleted.
As it turns out, Bush' s use of the word is more like his Clear Skies Initiative, or No Child Left Behind: words that mask damage.
That same week of the tenth anniversary of Rwanda's dark time, with 300,000 bodies already sluicing into Darfur's desert sands, the Bush administration turned aside from its bold declarations about Darfur, including the once-nuclear use of the G-word, and welcomed the head of Sudan's notorious security services -- because of Sudan's role in that other war. Nicholas Kristof says meekly:
Sudan's leaders have increased their cooperation with the C.I.A. As The Los Angeles Times reported, the C.I.A. recently flew Sudan's intelligence chief to Washington for consultations about the war on terror, and the White House doesn't want to jeopardize that channel.
Oh, Signor Kristof, there's more to it than a back channel. There's a deep and cozy relationshuo with the Mukhabarat , Sudan's KGB -- whose leader, Salah Abdalla Gosh, was named by no less an authority than Samantha Power as "one of the principal architects of Khartoum’s war in Darfur." Jeanne, at Body and Soul , fills in bits of that back channel:
Even before September 11, the Bush administration was attempting to improve relations with Sudan, and since then has formed a close intelligence partnership. The Mukhabarat detains suspects for the CIA to interrogate, and has expelled others to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Libya.
But guess what! It's even more fun than that! Katherine, the brilliant voice at Obsidian Wings, enlightened us further in comments on Jeanne's post:
In my research for the rendition paper--there's a case where five guys were flown out of Malawi, disappeared off the face of the earth for a few months, probably at some secret CIA facility, and where did they resurface but Khartoum...This is from The Guardian, August 21, 2003, p. 18:
"Nothing more was heard until July 24 when lawyers heard that Fahad Ral Bahli had surfaced in Riyadh and the other four in Sudan, all free men. Hub-Eddin Abbakar, a colleague of the Sudanese suspect, said they had been handed over to their respective embassies in Khartoum after the C.I.A. decided they were innocent."
They weren't tortured for once, so I assume they remained in U.S. custody, but, there's another piece of evidence of some secret CIA interrogation center in Sudan.
In other words, we can't condemn them for genocide when they're busy helping us construct an infrastructure worthy of a James Bond villain. It's as if our policymakers, rather than the straight and narrow Nixon Boys they present, took WAY too much mescaline and decided to use the result -- with its flashbacks to Vietnam and El Salvador, its Orwell-reversals and Roy Cohn manques -- as the new Constitution.
But now I'm veering way off the topic of remembrance. This is remembrance:
Human Rights Watch researchers had given children in Darfur crayons
and paper, to occupy them while the grownups talked. On their own, they
drew what they knew.
And I don't mean to make facile equivalences. but I have pages of not-dissimilar photos of drawings from a refugee camp at Jalazon,
in the West Bank: they drew helicopters, terror, blood. No active
genocide, perhaps, but children only know what they see. (And that was
1990, before the intifada was so deeply militarized on both sides).
While I looked at the photos, I thought of my visit to Israel's
Holocaust museum, Yad Vashem, a day earlier, and its images by the children in the camps (click here for samples from a book that displays them; I'm prevented by smart copyright protectors from giving you the images).
Those of us who think it's time to move "past" these offenses don't know what the kids know: that remembrance is the only starting point that's possible. Given the above, the accuracy of the memory is as important as its existence: but without its existence we're at the end of Hamlet.
In my ill-fated novel, my teenage protagonist takes solace in collage art, after the death of a dear friend (from AIDS: this was a 1980s novel) helps catalyze a shift away from her earlier indifference. She decides that her earlier declaration was completely correct -- but that constant sirens are therefore necessary.
I kneeled down and started to work, slowly, using chalks in a number of colors. I wrote the word "SIRENS" in big slanted block letters right across his body. I would have to be the siren, calling out sound in place of his voice, just like the ones in Jerusalem: calling up memory from underneath manufactured dream, until every day becomes remembrance day.
Thank you for your beautiful piece about genocide. We must all raise our voices.
This is the true war against terror. There can be no greater terror than a concentration camp or death by machete.
Bob
Posted by: Robert Freedland | May 08, 2005 at 01:19 PM