Two
plane crashes bookmarked
Alison Des Forges's life. The first was nearly 15 years ago, when a
luxury jet
carrying two African presidents was shot down by missiles over Rwanda.
The
second was last week, when a cramped commuter plane crashed in icy
weather near Buffalo,
New York,
killing 50 people. The first crash served as the
pretext for the swiftest genocide in history. The second silenced its
most
dogged witness, a tiny American lady with silver hair.
On April 6th 1994, Mrs. Des
Forges was at home in Buffalo.
The presidents of Rwanda
and Burundi
were assassinated at
8.20pm that day, which was lunchtime in Buffalo.
Twenty minutes later, a friend telephoned Mrs. Des Forges from Kigali, the
Rwandan capital. "This is
it. We're finished," said Monique Mujawamariya, a fellow human-rights
monitor.
Mrs. Des Forges called her
every half-hour, late into the night. She heard her describe steadily
more
alarming scenes militiamen going from house to house, pulling people
out and
killing them. Eventually, they came to Ms Mujawamariya's door. Mrs. Des
Forges
told her to pass the telephone to the killers. She would pretend to be
from the
White House, she said, and warn them off. "No, that won't work," said
Ms Mujawamariya. Then she added:
"Please take care of my
children. I don't want you to hear this." And she hung up.
From that moment on, Mrs. Des
Forges made a lot of noise. She was steeped in Rwanda's
turbulent history, having
written her doctoral thesis about it in 1972. And she had a better
sense than
most of the evil that was brewing two decades later. She had spent
years in Rwanda,
investigating political violence for Human Rights Watch. She knew that
a 1993
peace accord between the Hutu-dominated government and a Tutsi-led
rebel group,
the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), was written in water, and that Hutu
military
leaders were mulling mass killings to avoid sharing power. She knew
something
terrible was afoot.
Shouting at the deaf
She made calls, sent faxes
and frantically gathered information. By April 17th she was convinced
that a
full-blown genocide was under way. She was one of the first outsiders
to say
so. But everyone who mattered ignored her. Africa specialists at the
State
Department wept with her when she described what was going on, but who
listens
to Africa specialists? The top
bureaucrats at
the UN were concerned mostly with evacuating foreigners. President Bill
Clinton
was anxious to avoid another Somalia
(where, the previous year, 18 American soldiers had been killed during
a humanitarian
mission). Mrs. Des Forges could not even persuade the Pentagon to jam
the radio
broadcasts that coordinated the slaughter. It would have cost too much.
The genocide ended when the
RPF rebels overthrew the Hutu government and seized power. For the next
four
years Mrs. Des Forges led a team of researchers to dig up the facts.
She then
wrote the definitive account: nearly 800 pages of scrupulously
footnoted horror.
Future historians will depend on it. Her testimony helped put several
of the
perpetrators behind bars. And she made it impossible to argue, as many
did at
the time, that the genocide was a spontaneous explosion of ancient
tribal
hatred. She read the plans. She saw the receipts for half a million
machetes.
In some ways, she was
old-fashioned.
Whereas other human-rights
activists fuss about an ever-lengthening list of socioeconomic
"rights" (subsidized housing, fair trade, and so forth), Mrs. Des
Forges stuck to the basics, such as the right not to be murdered. She
took
extraordinary risks, rushing to the scenes of massacres and questioning
killers
when their blades were barely dry. She left out none of the ghastly
details: the
wives forced to bury their husbands before being raped; the baby thrown
alive
into a latrine.
She never went further than
the facts allowed. Others might speculate that the genocide claimed
800,000
victims, or a million. She stuck with half a million, because she could
substantiate it. Others assumed that if the genocidal Hutu regime were
the bad
guys, then the Tutsi rebels who overthrew them must be the good guys.
Not so
fast, said Mrs. Des Forges: only one side was guilty of genocide, but
both
committed war crimes. The RPF killed perhaps 25,000 people in 1994, she
reckoned.
Mrs. Des Forges's integrity
made her unpopular with the RPF regime that still rules Rwanda.
Last
year, after she wrote a balanced but critical report about the Rwandan
justice
system, she was barred from the country. Shortly before she died, she
spoke up
for an exiled academic she thought was unjustly accused of taking part
in the
genocide. She never seemed to rest. A report she edited about violence
in Congo
was
published posthumously.
What drove her? One story is
revealing.
In Burundi, Rwanda's
neighbor, tens of thousands of civilians were slaughtered in 1993. The
Western
media barely noticed. Hutu officers in Rwanda concluded that they
could do
the same thing, and no one would give a damn. Mrs. Des Forges wanted to
document such atrocities so meticulously, and publicize them so
persistently,
that people would have to give a damn. Her book was called, after a
killer's
cry, "Leave None to Tell the Story". She knew that story-telling
matters.
The Economist
Feb 21st-27th 2009
Đừng để
sổng một người nào để kể lại câu chuyện.
She knew that story-telling
matters.
Bà biết, kể ra được câu chuyện là tạo ra được ảnh hưởng.
On April 6th 1994, Mrs. Des
Forges was at home in Buffalo.
The presidents of Rwanda
and Burundi
were assassinated at
8.20pm that day, which was lunchtime in Buffalo.
Twenty minutes later, a friend telephoned Mrs. Des Forges from Kigali, the
Rwandan capital. "This is
it. We're finished," said Monique Mujawamariya, a fellow human-rights
monitor.
Mrs. Des Forges called her
every half-hour, late into the night. She heard her describe steadily
more
alarming scenes militiamen going from house to house, pulling people
out and
killing them. Eventually, they came to Ms Mujawamariya's door. Mrs. Des
Forges
told her to pass the telephone to the killers. She would pretend to be
from the
White House, she said, and warn them off. "No, that won't work," said
Ms Mujawamariya. Then she added:
"Please take care of my
children. I don't want you to hear this." And she hung up.
Alison chứng nhân tội diệt chủng,
mất ngày 12 Tháng Hai, thọ 66 tuổi.
Hai tai nạn máy bay tạo dấu ấn
cuộc đời Alison Des Forges. Tai nạn thứ nhất, xẩy ra gần 15 năm trước
đây, một
chiếc máy bay chở hai vị tổng thống bị hỏa tiễn hạ trên nển trời
Rwanda. Tai nạn
thứ nhì, tuần vừa rồi, gần Buffalo, New York, làm 50 người chết, trong
có bà, một
người Mỹ nhỏ nhắn, tóc bạc. Tai nạn thứ nhất chỉ là một cái cớ cho một
công cuộc
diệt chủng mau lẹ nhất trong lịch sử. Tai nạn thứ nhì làm bặt tiếng một
chứng
nhân, một sử gia thì cũng được, người có tham vọng ghi chép đầy đủ đến
từng chi
tiết vụ diệt chủng nói trên.
