Washington Week: Student Voices (O)

Ex-ambassador speaks to UC Berkeley class about Rwandan genocide
By Sonja Sharp
Daily Californian (UC-Berkeley)
10/25/2007

(U-WIRE) 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."

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