University Wire
October 25, 2007 Thursday
Ex-ambassador speaks to UC Berkeley class about Rwandan genocide
By Sonja Sharp, Daily Californian; SOURCE: UC-Berkeley
BERKELEY, Calif.
Speaking in Wheeler Hall on Wednesday night at the University of
California at Berkeley, former Rwandan ambassador to the United
States Theogene Rudasingwa described to students how, as a doctor by
training, he was thrust into the role of diplomat by the 100 days of
brutal ethnic violence that swept his country in 1994.
Addressing a crowd of three dozen people in the "Perspectives on
Genocide," Rudasingwa tried to evoke a panorama of the 100 years of
history that led up to those 100 days 1994, when members of the
country’s Hutu majority killed one million ethnic Tutsis.
"The problem of seeing Rwanda in snapshots is that we forget the long
trajectory that led here," Rudasingwa said.
Last night was Rudasingwa’s second appearance as a guest speaker for
a UC Berkeley class.
The class provides an overview of global genocides from the Armenian
genocide to the Holocaust to the current crisis in Darfur, spending
two weeks each on Cambodia, the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, among
other topics, said course facilitator Judy Taing.
Rudasingwa said the events of 1994 were preceded by more than 40
years of periodic ethnic violence, which had forced his family to
flee the country shortly after he was born.
"Even me, who is from Rwanda, would find it impossible to tell
between a Hutu and a Tutsi," Rudasingwa said.
"They had to go from village to village asking everyone if they were
Hutus or Tutsis. They had drawn lists in every village, and handed
out machetes. By July, the country was empty."
Taing said she invited Rudasingwa after hearing him speak at a
conference last year. The two are currently working to start a
permanent UC Berkeley course about genocide.
Rudasingwa said genocide is not Rwanda’s problem alone, and that
repercussions of the Rwandan genocide remain. While a genocide rages
in the Darfur region of Sudan, he said Hutu militias who have fled
Rwanda are roaming unchecked in the Democratic Republic of Congo
along the shared border.
For Taing, the issue of genocide is a personal one. Both her parents
fled the killings in Cambodia in the early 1980s, eventually arriving
in California as refugees. Though that genocide claimed more than 1.5
million lives — about a quarter of the Cambodian population — in
the late 1970s and early ’80s, Taing said few students have heard of
it.
"When I first came to Berkeley, I was pretty shocked how there was no
awareness about the Cambodian genocide," Taing said.
Her desire to raise awareness grew after she and her family visited
Cambodia in the summer of 2005. Taing said it was the first time her
mother had returned home since losing half their family to Pol Pot’s
Khmer Rouge.
Silence and fear are what allow genocides to go on, Rudasingwa said.
"The first thing we have to do (to stop genocide) is shout, and shout
at the top of our voices," Rudasingwa said. "The most important tool
in the hands of those who perpetrate genocide is silence."