Chantal Kayitesi

Survivor of the

Biography Ms Kayitesi: is a survivor of the 1994 Genocide against the in . Lost her husband, both her parents, two siblings, aunts uncles and many members of her extended family. In January 1995, she co- founder and former president of AVEGA-AGAHOZO, an Organization that provides support and advocate for genocide widows. While President of AVEGA, she was part of a Coalition that advocated for qualifying rape, other form of sexual violence and torture committed during the Genocide against Tutsis as crimes against humanity. AVEGA-AGAHOZO also was the winner of the 2011 Gruber Women’s Rights Prize. In 1999 Ms Kayitesi immigrated to the US with her son and in 2006 she co-founded a New England-Based organization FORGES-Inshuti that raises awareness about the genocide and educate the public about the Genocide against the Tutsis, Advocates and supports survivors’ orphans in Rwanda. In the US, Ms Kayitesi continues to advocate for peace and justice for survivors and has been active organizing annual events to commemorate the Genocide against Tutsis. Ms. Kayitesi speaks regularly at events such as commemorations or conferences organized by colleges and local organizations. Last year, during the 20 th Anniversary of the genocide against the Tutsis, she spoke at Tufts, Brandeis, Northeastern universities and at Harvard Kennedy School of Government about her experience as a survivor and her leadership role in survivors ‘organizations.

Ms. Kayitesi lives in Arlington Massachusetts and works at MGH- Chelsea as the Manager of the Refugee Health Program.

From the Boston Phoenix,

CHANTAL KAYITESI , was a married 29-year-old college student with a two-month-old son, living in Rwanda’s capital city of , when she awoke on the morning of April 7, 1994, to learn that the airplane carrying Rwanda’s president, Juvénal Habyarimana, had been shot down during the night. For months, persecution of the ethnic minority by extremists within the majority had been rising, with political assassinations and group killings of civilian Tutsis becoming increasingly common. Extremist Hutu hate radio had been promising an apocalypse in which Tutsis would perish, and "death lists" of Tutsis to be killed were known to be in circulation. Now Habyarimana, an extremist Hutu who had reluctantly agreed to share government power with Tutsis in the "Arusha Agreement" the previous August, had been killed. Nobody knows who shot down the presidential airplane, but the extremists blamed it on Tutsis and used it as an excuse to unleash the genocide. "On the radio at five o’clock in the morning, we heard that the president had been killed in the plane crash," Kayitesi recalls. "Then they just played classical music. I knew they were going to start killing." She was wrong: they had already begun. Extremist of the National Revolutionary Movement for Development (Mouvement Révolutionnaire National pour le Développement, or MRND) unleashed a long-planned, meticulously organized attempt to exterminate the country’s Tutsi population. In the next 100 days, an estimated 800,000 to 1,200,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were murdered. That first morning, the MRND executed Prime Minister , a moderate Hutu, and took over the government. They also slaughtered 10 Belgian members of the United Nations peacekeeping force that had been in Rwanda to oversee implementation of the Arusha Agreement signed by Habyarimana, leaving their dismembered bodies piled in a heap at Kigali Hospital and prompting the UN to withdraw its troops. By the time Kayitesi heard the news that morning, it was too late to flee. Overnight, as one of its first steps, the MRND had established roadblocks preventing Tutsis, like her and her family, from traveling. These roadblocks, where armed MRND troops searched all vehicles, kept Tutsis immobilized where they lived as militia groups swept through to kill them — starting in Kigali. Kayitesi and her husband, a professor at National University, believed that families in the university compound would be evacuated to safety by the international troops. They waited along with Kayitesi’s younger brother and sister, who were visiting to see the baby. "The militia came into the school and asked everyone to show identification," Kayitesi says. "They separated the Hutu and Tutsi and took us [Tutsis] outside, all in one line, to be killed. My baby was on my back, my husband was behind me, my brother and sister were in front of me, and all the militia with their weapons were surrounding us. Then a soldier came and took me and my husband out of the line — someone in the army thought we looked like we had money. I asked them to take my brother and sister, but they only took us. I gave them all the money I had, 20,000 Rwandan francs. A few feet away we started to hear them being shot." The bribe saved them for a day; her husband had another 20,000 francs they doled out to keep them alive and eventually got them out of Kigali. After a month of dodging the ever-expanding killings, Kayitesi hid in a shop while her husband went to find a friend who he hoped would help them. Instead, as she later learned, the friend had joined the MRND and ordered her husband shot, and his watch and pants taken. After hiding in the shop for another month, and then in a woman’s home, Kayitesi fled on foot with Claudine, a 15-year-old Tutsi who had been repeatedly raped by a militia member. As they ran through the sorghum fields, feeding spaghetti to her baby, Steve, to quiet him, they could see men with flashlights searching for them. They eventually found their way to the advancing rebel army, which sent them to a refugee camp until the killing ended. Her parents had been slaughtered in their house in the southern Rwandan city of Butare. Her house in the university compound was stripped of all her possessions. But she and her son had survived. Kayitesi and other local Rwandans are preparing to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the Tutsi genocide this month. Events are planned around the world, including here in Boston (see "Commemorating the Rwandan Genocide," page 27). Although there are perhaps only 20 Rwandans in the immediate Boston area and between 200 and 250 in New England, this is the only US region outside of Washington, DC, where a committee was formed to plan for the 10th- anniversary commemoration, according to Gerald Caplan, author of the report Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide and chair of the Remembering Rwanda Project that is coordinating and promoting local 10th-anniversary events (visit www.visiontv.ca/RememberRwanda/main_pf.htm). That’s in large part because of activists like Kayitesi, who helped found the Association of Genocide Widows (Association des Veuves du Génocide, or AVEGA) to aide Rwandan women who lost their husbands in the massacre, and Jean Nganji, a Rwandan living in Lowell, who has devoted his spare time to the commemoration project. Nganji was living in the US when the genocide started, and could do nothing while family and friends in his homeland died. Many local Rwandans were refugees in similar positions in , Congo, or . Just six months ago Nganji and Kayitesi were having trouble generating interest in the commemoration; they were unable to get a single university, individual, or organization to participate or partner in the planning. Although that sounds surprising, it’s not unusual; genocide often takes time to surface in the public consciousness. "It’s amazing, but between 1945 and 1961 there was almost total silence" about the Holocaust, says Larry Lowenthal, executive director of the American Jewish Congress chapter in Boston. "The Jews weren’t even talking about it." The World War I Armenian genocide in Turkey was similar, says Anthony Barsamian, chair of the Armenian Assembly of America, in Boston. "The people who are witness to it are the best advocates, but the people who are witness to it are usually so traumatized that they can’t even speak about it for several years," he says. But the lack of interest Nganji and Kayitesi were facing six months ago has changed in the last few months — not just in Boston but all over, it seems, as word of the genocide’s 10th anniversary has spread. Last December 23, the United Nations designated April 7, 2004, the "International Day of Reflection on the Genocide in Rwanda." The Holocaust Museum, in Washington, DC, is preparing a special exhibit. A panel discussion on the genocide last week at Harvard University, featuring Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaire, who led the United Nations Rwanda peacekeeping force, drew a standing-room-only crowd at Taubman Hall. Local Rwandans sense that the 10th anniversary is their best chance to get the world’s attention. But they wonder how best to use that attention. How should the world commemorate the Rwandan genocide? THE MOST obvious answer is, of course, simply by remembering the genocide. And that is what Nganji has tried to emphasize in the local events. A memorial mass at Boston College for the victims, for example, which has been planned as part of the commemoration, will be followed by a memorial garden tribute. Survivors will place pictures of their lost relatives on trees. Because the outside world did little to acknowledge or intervene in the genocide, Rwandans have feared from the beginning that their story would be ignored and forgotten. When the (RPF), a rebel army comprising primarily Tutsi refugees, defeated the MRND in July 1994 to end the genocide and establish a new government, people were actually ordered to leave their relatives’ bodies unburied, recalls Father Elisée Rutagambwa, a Rwandan native studying at Boston College, who returned to Rwanda from Burundi after the genocide to find that most of his family had been killed. "They needed people to come and see that this had happened." In large part because of the change in government, the Rwandan genocide has been one of the best documented in history, says Samantha Power, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, and a fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard. Nevertheless, attention tends to focus on the role played by the West — namely its failure to intercede — rather than on the Rwandan victims themselves. Because of this, Power explains, the Rwandan genocide "has become a symbol of what we are still capable of allowing." In that vein, she adds, "I do think the Rwandans feel invisible." Many local Rwandans want to ensure that the genocide is remembered from their point of view. They’ve been doing this, in part, through speaking engagements. Claude Kaitare, for example, a student at Clark University and a survivor of the genocide, spoke to an 11th-grade class at Charlestown High School last fall. The students were studying the Rwandan genocide in an elective class, using a curriculum developed by the Brookline educational organization Facing History and Ourselves. Dianelys Mejia, a student in the class, might forget some history lessons, but she says she’ll always remember that Intare’s sister survived the killings by pretending to be dead in a pile of bodies. She lay beneath her mother’s corpse, which hid her breathing. Perhaps more important than remembering what happened, however, is bringing the perpetrators to justice. Punishment of the guilty must take precedence if commemoration is to have meaning, Rutagambwa says. He fears that without punishment of individuals, history will cast the genocide as a generalized Hutu-Tutsi tribal struggle, rather than as a campaign by a group of anti-Tutsi extremists. In Rwanda, the extermination of the Tutsis centered around an aim of ethnic purity, an African version of the Nazi Aryan ideal, explains Rutagambwa, who has written about the history of post-independence Rwanda. "The ‘project’ was not for all of the Hutus. To qualify to be a ‘real’ Hutu, you have to be able to put all four fingertips into your nose," he says. A great many of the dead were Hutus deemed either politically moderate or racially impure. The leading perpetrators of the genocide — most of whom were educated at European universities — planned the killings for at least three years in advance. They imported an estimated 85,000 tons of munitions and more than half a million machetes, which were distributed to MRND members and stored in secret caches for rapid deployment. (An informant’s warning about these weapons, and the specific plans to precede a Tutsi genocide with the killing of Belgian peacekeepers, was forwarded in January 1994 to UN headquarters, which took no action.) They trained special death squads called the Interahamwe, drew up plans for quickly establishing roadblocks around the capital, and distributed "death lists" of important people to kill first — all well before the genocide began. This preparation made possible the swiftness, precision, and ferocity of the killing. "It was Nazi-like in its sophistication and its pace," Power says. Only 20 of the genocide’s core perpetrators have been prosecuted by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). Another 57 prosecutions are in progress, including the cases of 10 suspected perpetrators who’ve been indicted but remain at large. "There was a time when it seemed there was an effort to capture them, but now it doesn’t seem like it," Rutagambwa says. The efforts are being reinvigorated, says Farhan Haq, UN spokesperson for Rwanda. "The Rwanda tribunal has captured many of the big fish, but obviously that’s not enough," Haq says. Last Friday, UN secretary-general Kofi Annan issued a call to governments to assist in turning over suspected war criminals, specifically mentioning Félicien Kabuga. A Rwandan businessman, Kabuga is suspected of bankrolling the genocide, including the purchase of weapons. Beyond the "big fish" being tried by the ICTR, there are thousands of lower- level suspected perpetrators who were arrested in the genocide’s aftermath. For years little happened with them — there were too many for the Rwandan courts to process, and nobody wanted simply to let them go back to live among their victims. To solve the problem, the country has performed a series of locally based "Gacaca" trials, where people of a town gather together to bear witness for and against the accused (gacaca is the green where village elders traditionally met to settle disputes). Anyone can rise to speak, for or against each defendant; the process serves both to mete out justice and to provide a public accounting of the atrocities. "It’s very intimate," says Michal Safdie, a Cambridge artist whose photographs of two Gacaca trials in November 2002 will be displayed at Harvard as part of the commemoration. "I was so worried that people would start fighting, but they didn’t. They have to live with each other. It is beyond understanding." The trials of the perpetrators can serve another function, says Karen Murphy, senior program associate for Facing History and Ourselves. Trials explore the facts, which can help in the process of recognizing and preventing future genocides. Otherwise, she says, we will always be responding to the aftermath, rather than the early warning signs. "There is a pattern of ignoring things to the point where they become unimaginable," says Murphy. "Do we need 500,000 people to be murdered to say that there were elements of genocide? ‘Genocide’ is too late." Power says that the prevention of future genocides — which is the theme of her book — should be the most important facet of the Rwandan-genocide commemoration. "My obsession is, if it happened again we would do the same thing," she says, meaning that the West would sit idly by and do nothing. "I don’t want others to have to deal with this aftermath." Power specifically points to western Sudan’s Darfur region, where the UN believes 700,000 Muslims have been deliberately displaced from their homes by government-backed militias, and where civilians are reportedly being systematically killed. The international organization Genocide Watch lists Sudan, along with Ethiopia, Burundi, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, at the "genocide massacre stage," meaning that mass killings are under way. It lists five other countries at the genocide "preparation stage," which involves a mixture of small-scale killings, isolation of the target group, and arming of the genocide planners — conditions similar to those in Rwanda before the president’s plane went down. None of these current situations has commanded much public attention or US-government action. "It’s a big deal if you can get your message on the streaming ticker at the bottom of CNN," says Josh Rubenstein, executive director of Amnesty International’s Northeast US office, in Somerville. "Nobody should be proud of their reaction to the events 10 years ago in Rwanda," Rubenstein says. Furthermore, despite a predictable round of "never again" promises, the world’s governments and international organizations still have no established criteria for responding to genocide. That includes Amnesty International itself. "We do not have a policy of humanitarian intervention," he concedes. Barsamian and Lowenthal agree that persecuted groups like their own have been better at promoting "never forget" than "never again." But they both note that their focus is changing. "It’s critical that we acknowledge each other’s genocides, so that we can start to understand why these things happen," Barsamian says. The UN and other international bodies have also been making a renewed effort to push for serious, worldwide definitions and policies regarding genocide; conferences this spring in Sweden and The Hague have demonstrated the interest, if not yet the results. Haq says that although international efforts have been lacking, individual countries have taken initiative in recent crises. He points to the interventions of Australia in East Timor, France in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the US in Liberia and Haiti. "The systems by which countries and the United Nations respond to atrocities have improved," Haq says. BUT WHAT about the response to the aftermath? Ten years after the genocide, Rwanda is pitiably poor, ranking 152 out of 162 nations on the United Nations Human Development Index. When the genocide ended and the perpetrators fled, they left little of the country’s limited resources behind. "They emptied the country — the money from the banks, the cows from the farms, everything," says Rutagambwa. Like many local Rwandans, he plans to return to assist in his country’s reconstruction — but has little to return to. His family’s property has been claimed by someone else, he says. Despite significant improvement, thanks in large part to international grants, some 90 percent of the people still survive on subsistence farming. Some Rwandans and observers hope that this 10th anniversary will spur people to help now, rather than just lament what happened in the past. "They want people to come and invest," says Sister Ann Fox, executive director of the Paraclete Center, an educational organization in South Boston. Fox has been to Rwanda three times and is working to raise money to start a girls’ school in Butare. A recent Michigan State and Texas A&M initiative created a 1000-farmer cooperative that grows coffee for international sale. "A little money goes a long way there," Fox says. Economic recovery is one thing — but other scars of the genocide remain. "The top priority, I think, are the women," says Kayitesi. The UN has estimated that more than three percent of all the country’s women were raped during the genocide, and that half of those raped were infected with HIV/AIDS — along with thousands of the children they gave birth to. An estimated five percent of these victims and their children receive antiretroviral treatment — while those who infected them, in many cases, received the treatments thanks to their rights as prisoners of the Rwandan government. Tuberculosis and malaria are also problems, says the UN’s Haq. Huge numbers of women were left widowed, and hundreds of thousands of children were orphaned. "These children were very, very wounded," Rutagambwa says. "There was nothing you could do to satisfy them." "I went to a boarding school with eight hundred kids, and probably three or four hundred were orphans," says Fox. "Even the Hutus — the innocent Hutus who were forced to flee the country — these people have suffered a lot," Rutagambwa adds. When Safdie — a daughter of a Holocaust survivor — traveled to Rwanda a year and a half ago to photograph the Gacaca trials, she found that the genocide permeates life there. She spoke with a woman in her home, where she was raising all the children of her siblings who had been murdered. "I had been worried, how was I going to portray something that happened so long ago through photographs? But [the genocide] is not only about the past, but about life today," Safdie says. The impoverished country’s government has been able to do little for the survivors. And people have, not surprisingly, lost faith in their institutions — including the Catholic Church, which played a central role in Rwandan life before the genocide. Several priests and nuns have been convicted for complicity in the genocide; a bishop was tried and acquitted. Many Rwandans believe that others who remain in positions of Church leadership today were also involved or passively stood by. "The Church can still play a big role in uniting people," says Rutagambwa. "But they need to acknowledge what happened, and change the leadership." Rwandans don’t trust their schools, either. Immediately after the genocide ended, the new government declared a 10-year ban on teaching history — all history. The idea was to take the time to understand what happened and how best to teach it. The ban expires in June, and those questions must now be addressed. Murphy is helping to develop the new curriculum. "We don’t want to build our future on the old lies," Rutagambwa says. But how long does it take to understand genocide? "I was sitting across from a senior person in the Ministry of Education who said, ‘Is 10 years too soon?’" Murphy says. Rwanda’s government doesn’t even acknowledge ethnicity anymore — a deliberate attempt to erase the decades of prejudice that preceded the genocide. "It was taught in school that Tutsi did not matter," says Sam Mbanda, a Rwandan who now lives in Boston. Rwandan citizens are no longer called Hutu or Tutsi, a huge change from decades of carrying ethnic identification cards, which dated back to Belgian colonization in the 1930s. "The first time I learned I was a Tutsi was in first grade," Kayitesi says. "My teacher asked everyone whether they were Hutu or Tutsi. I had to ask my father." In fourth grade, she says, the teacher asked the Hutu students, and then the Tutsi students, to stand up so she could count them. "My friends stood up with the Hutu, so I stood up because I wanted to be with them," she recalls. "But my teacher knew my family and made me stand with the Tutsi. That day, those friends refused to play with me because I was different." Kayitesi is now raising her own son, the one she carried and breast-fed for three months while running and hiding from the killers. He turned 10 in February. She will bring him to place a picture of his father in the Rwandan- genocide garden memorial tribute this month.

David S. Bernstein can be reached at [email protected]

Chantal’s work with women survivors

The genocide that began in 1994 in Rwanda took from Chantal Kayitesi most of the people who mattered to her, except her son. Determined to help others in her situation, Chantal joined a group of women and together they founded AVEGA, an organization established to address the many needs of genocide widows, many of whom had also been raped, stripped of all family, and left to count their losses while they themselves clung tentatively to life. "Women lost everything," Chantal says, as if the word could possibly encompass their layers of suffering."At the same time, their homes were taken and their belongings stolen. The majority of women didn't go to school and they suddenly found themselves needing to work to survive." At AVEGA, where Chantal was the vice president then president, women received counseling for their grief, medical attention for their wounds, and help in their search for a home. The organization also provided startup funds to help women develop small businesses and assistance with making their voices heard within the legal system. Having trained as a nurse and equipped with a Bachelor's of Science degree in public health, Chantal was well qualified for this work. Her determination and advocacy for Rwandan widows took her in 1995 to Beijing as part of a delegation that represented AVEGA. While in Rwanda, she also founded and was a member of a coalition that advocated for qualifying rape and other forms of sexual violence committed during the genocide as a crime against humanity. In addition, she was the president of the Commission of Social Affairs at Pro-Femmes, an umbrella of 35 associations of women in Rwanda. By 1999, Chantal decided to move to the United States with her five-year-old son to Dover, New Hampshire. Unlike some refugees headed toward an uncertain future in a new land,she was not afraid as she boarded her flight."I was determined to work hard to make it for me and my son. I had no doubt I was going to succeed. I told myself, 'I'm healthy, I can make it. I just have to work hard.'" Like many new immigrants, Chantal wasn't able to utilize her vast experience, the three languages she spoke, or her education and decided to go back to school. She applied to and was accepted into a Master of Science in public health program at Boston University, which provided her with a scholarship. Chantal graduated from the program in 2002 and began working with the New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services. As an adolescent health program coordinator, she has addressed maternal/child health issues among refugees and others. Her work has focused on a variety of issues including access to health care, mental health, and positive youth development. Not confined to health issues, she has also helped with a variety of parenting concerns, such as communication between parents and adolescents, mentoring, and involving youth in the community. She now works for Massachusetts General Hospital ...