“Thirty years have passed since 100 days of violence ravaged Rwanda. Thirty years since machetes slashed, grenades exploded, since bodies rotted, since homes burned, since churches became slaughterhouses and the soil became swollen with blood. Rwandans are still living with the scars of those terrible days. They are still learning how to calibrate their memories of all that happened,” Clint Smith writes. [https://theatln.tc/WKQUylvl](https://theatln.tc/WKQUylvl)
Smith traveled to Rwanda to understand how the 1994 genocide is remembered in the country’s official memorials as well as in the minds of victims—and to learn how its perpetrators look back on what they did. “Over the past decade, I have traveled to dozens of sites throughout America and around the world to explore how crimes against humanity are memorialized. Rwanda has some of the most graphic sites of memory I have ever seen, places where the gruesome reality of what occurred is on display in sometimes shocking detail,” he writes.
Questions of whom and how to forgive—of whether to forgive at all—still weigh heavily in Rwanda, Smith reports. “We try to live—to survive, to live with them,” said one man, Eric, whose family, like many other Tutsi at the time, left Rwanda in 1959 to escape violence at the hands of Hutu extremists. His family returned in 1995, after the genocide ended. “Still, we have to be careful, because we are not sure if their hearts have changed,” he continued. “Thirty years is not enough to trust them,” Eric said. “We work together. We live together. But we don’t trust them.”
For many survivors, Smith writes, “It is impossible to truly forget. It is a decision to forgive. It is a constant struggle to move on.”
— Kate Guarino, audience and engagement editor, The Atlantic
New-Skin-2717 on
I hate my family, so i would likely forgive them in style
The_ghost_of_spectre on
This is one of the reasons, though Kagame is an authoritarian, I support his reign. Rwanda hasn’t healed from its trauma and it would not take much for it simmer up again.
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“Thirty years have passed since 100 days of violence ravaged Rwanda. Thirty years since machetes slashed, grenades exploded, since bodies rotted, since homes burned, since churches became slaughterhouses and the soil became swollen with blood. Rwandans are still living with the scars of those terrible days. They are still learning how to calibrate their memories of all that happened,” Clint Smith writes. [https://theatln.tc/WKQUylvl](https://theatln.tc/WKQUylvl)
Smith traveled to Rwanda to understand how the 1994 genocide is remembered in the country’s official memorials as well as in the minds of victims—and to learn how its perpetrators look back on what they did. “Over the past decade, I have traveled to dozens of sites throughout America and around the world to explore how crimes against humanity are memorialized. Rwanda has some of the most graphic sites of memory I have ever seen, places where the gruesome reality of what occurred is on display in sometimes shocking detail,” he writes.
Questions of whom and how to forgive—of whether to forgive at all—still weigh heavily in Rwanda, Smith reports. “We try to live—to survive, to live with them,” said one man, Eric, whose family, like many other Tutsi at the time, left Rwanda in 1959 to escape violence at the hands of Hutu extremists. His family returned in 1995, after the genocide ended. “Still, we have to be careful, because we are not sure if their hearts have changed,” he continued. “Thirty years is not enough to trust them,” Eric said. “We work together. We live together. But we don’t trust them.”
For many survivors, Smith writes, “It is impossible to truly forget. It is a decision to forgive. It is a constant struggle to move on.”
Read the full story: [https://theatln.tc/WKQUylvl](https://theatln.tc/WKQUylvl)
— Kate Guarino, audience and engagement editor, The Atlantic
I hate my family, so i would likely forgive them in style
This is one of the reasons, though Kagame is an authoritarian, I support his reign. Rwanda hasn’t healed from its trauma and it would not take much for it simmer up again.