To Kigali College, and then to the country for a different kind of lesson
Step outside the hotel.
Another poignant sight in Kigali is the site of the technical school, L'Ecole Technique Officielle, where 100 Belgian soldiers kept a machete-wielding mob at bay. At least they did while they were there. For in keeping with the general UN policy, the Belgians decided to evacuate their forces.
As the UN troops withdrew through one gate, the genocidaires moved in through the other. Within a few hours, over 2,000 men, women and children who had fled there seeking UN protection were dead.
Here, international wrangling at the UN bore its bitter fruit. With Britain and Belgium demanding out, with the French still aiding the killers, and the Americans worried about being “sucked in,” the international community decided to abandon the people of Rwanda at the very moment when they were being exterminated.
Overall, in spite of his earlier inaction, we should give some credit to Romeo Dallaire, who finally maneuvered to keep his forces at nearly twice the size authorized (500 troops). And by merely sitting there, they managed to save the lives of an estimated 20,000 to 25,000 Rwandans.
Mind you, when France sent 500 soldiers to evacuate its own citizens and Akazu members on April 8 and 9, Dallaire's UN troops received orders reminding them not to help save threatened Rwandans, but only foreigners.
“You should make every effort not to compromise your impartiality or to act beyond your mandate,” wrote Kofi Annan and Iqbal Riza in an April 9 telegram, “but [you] may exercise your discretion to do [so] should this be essential for the evacuation of foreign nationals.”
Today there is another kind of political lesson to be learned from Rwanda. The Interahamwe soldier who led the assault on Kigali College was one of the first people tried and justly convicted by the war-crimes tribunal. For the school year of 2004, the Rwandan Ministry of Education chose the theme “La part de I'enseignant dans la lutte contre le divisionnisme et l'idéologie génocidaire” (“The role of the school student in the fight against the divisiveness of the ideology of genocide”).
And today, travelers who tour around the country can only be impressed by the warmth and courage of the people, so soon after the cataclysm. Genocide sites and memorials dot the country, (such as Murambi Technical College where 50,000 bodies were found) yet also ten times as many new signs of beginnings, new reconstructions, involving all Rwandans. As one of the rangers showing westerners to the mountain gorillas put it:
We can't ignore it, it's part of our history and we want people to know about it, but it's in the past. We're in the process of healing, moving on, looking to the future.