The Middle East continues to dominate the news headlines and the stories coming out of Palestine and Isreal are harrowing whilst the Ukraine Russia war still rages and many other places are also in turmoil,
My thoughts go back to visiting Rwanda almost two years after the genocide. My journey begins at a small village church set in a clearing shielded by tall eucalyptus trees. The building has a corrugated roof, grills on the windows and inside there are rows of low benches in front of a brick altar with an open Bible on top. The benches are empty of worshippers only the remains of their lives lie on the mud floor, bones, looted suitcases, a water bottle and left shoe size four. Outside the building a long trestle table is packed with pile upon pile of skulls, some with machetes still sticking out, others cracked and broken, many undamaged all bleached in the blistering sunshine. The Hutu gangs swopped on schools and churches, homes and farms and indiscriminately slaughtered Tutsi they called cockroaches using machetes and rifles often to kill friends, sometimes relatives.
I visited a large and beautiful church outside Kigali and as I stood under an avocado tree groaning with fruit, I was invited in by a hoard of children. Inside was wrecked, benches over turned and broken, the statue of Our Lady riddled with bullet holes. the light was shafting through holes in the high ceiling and it was chilling. Especially as the children were playing tig round the place. One came up to me and holding on to my skirt, pulled me over to one corner where there were black bin bags stacked high. They indicated I take pictures of them as they posed in front, one child held his nose. Then I realised the bags were filled with remains of their mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, aunts, uncles and the rest of the family.
It Was Shocking.
These wretched men women and children had been brutally murdered in 100 days only months before hand. A ‘corridor of tranquility’ allowed me to travel through the country where the Rwandan civil war had raged between April and July 1994 when members of the Tutsi minority ethnic group were killed by armed Hutu militias. It’s estimated that up to 800,000 Tutsi died and up to half a million women and girls raped. .
When our local writer Tony Macaulay visited Rwanda he was deeply concerned and he reflected on the genocide by writing Kill The Devil which lays bear the history of those years. Since then he has been very involved in reconciliation and is on the steering group developing the Rwanda Peace and Reconciliation Centre. His story is about a woman who lost her whole family to the Hutu militia, she was left, they said she wasn’t worth raping. She had nothing to live for but she was rescued from the lake and, although she didn’t want to, she lived to meet the man who oversaw the massacre of her family. It’s a powerful story, hard to read at times but the point is, after the war, the killings the hatred and the hardship, eventually there was peace,
At the launch of his book earlier this year his co-writer Juvens Nsabimana joined us by zoom from Nairobi and they talked of love and living in peace. There had just been a day of remembering all the people from all backgrounds who lost their lives in those 100 dreadful days.
“A day of reflection for young and old healing through remembering and truth telling. It needs brave leadership to establish such a thing,” Tony added, “governments have never managed to do this, here it needs to be lead by Stormont if not Stormont then the people should make it happen. Forgiveness is hard and simple, if Rwanda can do so can we”
But the question is can the two waring factions in the Middle East find a way to peace? At the moment it seems unlikely, are the wounds too deep and too lasting?
CELEBRATING ULSTER TELEVISION
Ulster Television opened its door to the public 64 years ago on Hallowee’n afternoon and the fun and games began. A small studio typically hosting lambs in one corner, turned out the director had an allergy to the straw in the corner and couldn’t see what he was doing, ballet dancers in another corner when the record stuck and the elegant couple were frozen in full arabesque and an actor doing a live commercial for sherry in the third corner, sadly too much sherry in rehearsals caught up with him, stumbled into the studio for transmission, was propped up against a table with the glass and bottle by his hand. His eye lids drooped and we held our collective breaths. Camera focused on him, green light on, this professional actor straighten up lifted the glass smiled at the audience at home, drank the sherry told everyone the name on the lable and that was it, camera moved on to the next item and at once, out of sight, our dear friend fell to the ground unconscious!. The rest of the studio space was taken up by three cameras, a mic on a long pole, a news desk, two presenters and a floor manager conducting the show. And everything was live, even the Irish dancing programmes.
No one was prepared for the memorable evening when Ivor Mills was interviewing a highly respected businessman about the introduction of dictaphones, he’d brought his attractive secretary with him to give her opinion on this recording device. “Seems like a revolutionary time saving device” says Ivor. “But,” he turns to the secretary, “not good news for you – makes you almost redundant.” All eyes on the secretary for her reaction.
She stands up, walks regally across to Ivor. Everyone holds their breath, is she going to attack him in front of the audience at home. No, with a sweet smile she sits on his knee, takes his handsome face in her hands and kisses him long and hard on his lips. No one moves, mesmerised at the scene. She brakes away and turns to the camera, winks, announcing: ”A dictaphone can’t do that.”
The interesting thing is, after that, said secretary who earlier had worked for BOAC airline as a meeter and greeter for VIPs, and some of her stories were very juicy, however made such an impact on that day in Studio One that she ended up as our makeup artist and Shelia Hewitt Dundee was a joy to know,
