Article shared by John Gilmartin
Here’s a piece from Nature. We are now in the 30th anniversary of the Rwanda Hutu Tutsi genocide. Overall I’d say this summary on genocide research is useful, but my first reaction is how mediocre the follow up has been.
I thought you might want to share it with Nigel Fisher, and he may have thoughts to add.
I have two personal memories of the event, first Tanny Noorlander, and the other of one of our staff in Kigali who met with me in Copenhagen about two weeks before the murdering began.
Tanny was based in Copenhagen when the event started, and she was requested to join the field office to help them respond. Tanny was a great choice, she didn’t let little things upset her, she was organized, could give orders, but she was cheerful and had a wonderful smile. Women in the supply division office trusted her. She was practical. Tanny was on assignment for about a month or two in my vague recollection, it may have been longer. I remember wishing her well and hoping she would survive it.
When she returned to Denmark I remember thinking ‘we’ didn’t hold a big welcome or have a special meal to welcome her home. It was a busy office and we generally worked in our little silos. I was curious to hear Tanny’s story, and gain an impression of how she endured the assignment. Since no one organized a large meeting I asked Tanny if she would do a brown bag lunch for those who wanted to hear her. We did. I remember introducing Tanny to the group and mentioning how doing the sort of work Tanny just finished was not just difficult, but that leaving the country and readjusting can be worse. Tanny said thanks and started her brief talk. I remember realizing Tanny was fine, she described the situation she found with the most matter of fact description, how one of her primary tasks was organizing corpse removal, finding dump trucks and organizing teams who would quietly, respectfully load bodies into the trucks and then carry out burials.
As she got that in hand, she needed to get the supply function restarted. Again, she described bringing some of the old staff back to work and finding new people able to join. Essentially, the office needed to be restored while working full blast. Again, no emotion, Tanny made it sound like another task she needed to get done. I marveled at her composure. And, she went straight back to work. As to discussing how traumatic the situation was, that wasn’t for discussion.
My other recollection was from perhaps two weeks before the murdering began a unicef man, I can not remember his name, was visiting supply division and wanted to talk with me. I was then leading the vaccine supply group. We covered his vaccine needs in no time, Rwanda was a small country for supply issues, but he really wanted to tell me I needed to understand what was about to happen in Rwanda. He then laid out in terror what he was sure was about to happen. That he was trying to warn everyone in Unicef and any embassy he could talk to. He wanted to know what I was going to do about it. I remember thinking, ‘who is this guy? Why is he telling me? And what am I going to do about his story?’ I regret I did nothing I can recall. I’m sure I passed his story up the ladder, but no follow up. We had a lot of visitors in those days, and we were busy etc etc.
John Gilmartin
Excerpts:
"This work is especially important now in light of violent crises in several parts of the world, including in Ukraine, Israel and Gaza, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Although there is debate about whether these conflicts meet the definition of genocide, some share similar characteristics. Research conducted into atrocities such as the genocide in Rwanda can help to inform responses and longer-term approaches to healing."
"Before 1994, the field of genocide studies was dominated by the Holocaust — the systematic killing of 6 million Jewish people by Nazi Germany during the Second World War. “It’s only in the last 20 years that other genocides have entered the discussion,” says Clark. But research on Rwanda didn’t start immediately. “It was only maybe 10–15 years after the genocide that scholars started to really interrogate this question of what drove hundreds of thousands of everyday civilians to participate in mass violence.”
"“People negotiate a space for thinking, for giving meaning to life — which allows us to better understand what extermination and death are.”
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00997-7
Thirty years after the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, Nature met with researchers who are gaining insights that could help to prevent other atrocities and enable healing.
"This work is especially important now in light of violent crises in several parts of the world, including in Ukraine, Israel and Gaza, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Although there is debate about whether these conflicts meet the definition of genocide, some share similar characteristics. Research conducted into atrocities such as the genocide in Rwanda can help to inform responses and longer-term approaches to healing."
"Before 1994, the field of genocide studies was dominated by the Holocaust — the systematic killing of 6 million Jewish people by Nazi Germany during the Second World War. “It’s only in the last 20 years that other genocides have entered the discussion,” says Clark. But research on Rwanda didn’t start immediately. “It was only maybe 10–15 years after the genocide that scholars started to really interrogate this question of what drove hundreds of thousands of everyday civilians to participate in mass violence.”
"“People negotiate a space for thinking, for giving meaning to life — which allows us to better understand what extermination and death are.”
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00997-7
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