Warning: violence, graphic imagery.
With painful precision, Frida Umuhoza reminisces on the day that would change her life forever.
“We had heard the announcements on radio RTLM. The plane carrying President Juvenal Habyarimana had crashed and the Hutu’s were now being called to arms,” says Umuhoza, 38, a survivor of the 1994 genocide that wiped out Tutsis in record numbers, including her entire family.
Habyarimana belonged to the Hutu ethnic group and his death was chalked up as an assassination by Tutsi rebels, although there have been conflicting reports of where the missiles that were aimed at president Habyarimana’s plane came from.
“Hutus were told to prepare themselves because they already had everything they needed to finish the job. We didn’t really react because we could not believe that our friends and neighbours would kill us on account of our different ethnicity and that in the next 100 days, one million Tutsis would be murdered.”
Finish the job was the message being broadcast nationally to Hutus in Rwanda.
In 1994, Frida Umuhoza was 14 years old and the third born in her family. She had an elder brother and sister, twins, 16 years old and following her were two boys, 11 and nine.
A year earlier when the tensions between Hutus and Tutsis began to take shape in Rwanda, Umuhoza’s youngest sibling, only 9 months old at the time, was killed in hospital by a Hutu doctor.
In April 1994, there were daily announcements on the radio agitating for the extermination of Tutsis. At the time, Umuhoza’s mum tried to convince their dad to let the children flee the country. Umuhoza’s dad resisted, believing in the goodness of his Hutu neighbours and friends. Umuhoza’s father had been an active member of the community, having played professional football. In his spare time, he coached the local football team and was renowned in their neighbourhood, Nyanza.
Following Habyarimana’s plane crash, curfews were enacted and life as they knew it came to a deafening halt. The streets were lonely and deserted as kids were held back from attending school, and their parents and grandparents remained indoors. By virtue of being a Tutsi, Umuhoza and her family were the most wanted people in Rwanda and, at the time, identification cards recorded the ethnicity of the card holder. Although Tutsis have distinguishing facial features, any genetic ambiguity was dissolved by I.D. cards.
The killings in Nyanza didn’t begin until the third week after the plane crash. It was the last time Frida’s family would all be together.
“Nothing can prepare you for the day you see your mum beheaded,” Umuhoza tells SBS Life woefully.
In neighbouring Burundi, Delphine Umutoni and her family waited with awful anticipation. Her family had fled Rwanda as refugees before she was born when murmurs of aTutsi annihilation became louder. The genocide in 1994 was a culmination of earlier killings, but the targeting of Tutsis had begun a lot earlier, in 1959. Both her mum and dad lost their fathers in targeted killings in 1962 and 1969 respectively.
We identified my uncle by his unique blue pants from a pit that had approximately 5000 bodies in it
When news spread that the genocide had ended in July of 1994, Umutoni and her family returned to Rwanda. Nothing could prepare them for the piles of bodies strewn everywhere, discarded as too inadequate to receive a proper burial.
“You would be taken to a house filled with dead bodies, blood, bones and other human remains and would have to clean it up and occupy it. We had to be strategic and choose houses that had the least amount of bodies in them and therefore requiring the least amount of cleaning,” Umutoni says.
That was the reality of the genocide aftermath. Families returned from wherever they had sought refuge, emptied the houses of dead bodies, buried who they could and called the military to collect the remains of the rest.
After settling down, Umutoni’s dad would make daily trips to the Rwanda-Burundi border to search for survivors in their family. It was 1994, technology had not yet afforded the conveniences we enjoy today. Life was at a crawling pace and the trauma and PTSD following the genocide was palpable.
Survivors lived in perpetual devastation. “Because of the grotesque nature of the killings, you were lucky if you could identify a family member. We identified my uncle by his unique blue pants from a pit that had approximately 5000 bodies in it,” Umutoni remarks.
Meanwhile, Umuhoza was trying to put back the pieces of her life having witnessed the murder of her entire family and only surviving by divine luck. Umuhoza had been hit in the head by her weapon of choice, a club.
Months earlier her family were lined up in front of a ditch to be killed, 16 in total including extended family like her grandparents.
“Please use the club on me,” Umuhoza had pleaded with one of the killers, a young man who used to play soccer in the team her dad coached. Umuhoza’s reasoning at the time was that the club would result in a less cumbersome death, compared to the machetes or the clubs with nails attached to them.
Having received a blow to the head, she had fallen unconscious and long presumed dead, had been buried alive
Before settling on the murder weapon of choice, Umuhoza says her family had been asked if they had enough money to buy a quicker death. Grenades and bullets could be used, but Tutsis, being deemed unworthy of precious artillery, would only be killed instantaneously if they could afford to buy the bullet or grenade that would do the job.
Umuhoza remembers lying in the ditch piled with bodies of her family members, her mother’s decapitated head close to her. Having received a blow to the head, she had fallen unconscious and long presumed dead, had been buried alive.
Umuhoza later learned that her father, having watched from the roof as his entire family was wiped out, had come down and given himself up to the killers. Frida was the only one in her family who survived.
Twenty five years on, Rwandans in Melbourne are planning the annual Kwibuka, an event where Rwandans come together on the anniversary of the genocide to share their stories, lean on each other for support and honour those who lost their lives in the most tragic of ways. Kwibuka means ‘to remember’ in Kinyarwanda.
Umuhoza and Umutoni, who now both reside in Melbourne, share their stories in the hopes that the slogan ‘never again’ remains alive through actions and deeds and that the 1994 genocide serves as a global cautionary tale. It’s what led Umuhoza to write a book detailing her experiences, called “In The School of Resilience”.
For Umuhoza, “25 years is a long time but it can also be a short time because when I talk about the genocide, it seems like it was just yesterday.”
This year’s Kwibuka function organised by the Rwandan community in Melbourne will be held on 27 April 2019 at St Theresa’s Catholic Church in Albion at 11am. Kwibuka 25, organised by the Jewish community in Melbourne will be held on 16 May 2019 at the Jewish Centre in Melbourne. The ceremonies provide an opportunity for all to stand together with the Rwandan community.
