Nine-year-old Rwandan Jacqueline Murekatete clutched her grandmother as she eyed the blood-splattered machete in the hand of a death squad leader. The man her uncle had hired to protect the pair was the only thing standing between her and death.
Murekatete turned out to be more fortunate than the 1 million who Rwandans estimate were killed in the country’s 100-day genocide in 1994.
After their narrow escape, Murekatete’s grandmother took her to an orphanage owned by Italian priests. During her two-month stay there, Jacqueline witnessed extreme human suffering. Dozens of children came in every week wounded, missing limbs, near death. Diseases were rampant.
“Two year olds cried through the night,” she recalled during a speech in Milwaukee on Monday night, Dec. 10. The orphanage, which stayed open only because the priests regularly bribed the Hutu warriors, had to start its own cemetery. “We buried children every week,” Murekatete said.
Now a composed, confident human rights activist, Murekatete spoke to an audience of about 100 (mostly students) at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Student Union on Monday night. She retold the horror of those days and called for action.
Murekatete recounted the events leading to the genocide. In 1994, the Hutus, who comprised 85 percent of Rwanda’s population, controlled the government.
When the Hutu president, Juvénal Habyarimana, was assassinated, the government blamed the rival Tutsis (about 15 percent of the population) for the murder and ordered every one of them killed.
The government had been preparing for the massacre, having imported thousands of machetes two years prior and armed a 30,000-member militia. Most of the genocide was carried out with these machetes as neighbors turned on neighbors. Daily government radio broadcasts instructed the Hutus to “do their jobs” and labeled the Tutsis cockroaches that must be exterminated.
After being rescued from the orphanage, Murekatete learned that her entire immediate family — parents, four brothers and two sisters — plus her grandmother had been killed.
An uncle who was living in the United States applied for her political asylum and later adopted her.
Holocaust parallels
When Murekatete was a sophomore in high school, a Polish Holocaust survivor named David Gewirtzman spoke to her class. He recounted how he survived World War II by hiding with his family in a tiny, muddy, waste-filled trench under a pigsty on a Polish farm for 20 months.
When he emerged from the trench he was one of only 16 survivors out of the 8,000 Jews from his town of Losice.
“I saw similarities between what happened to him and what happened to me,” said Murekatete. She wrote him a letter about her story, expressing her own feelings as a survivor. Gewirtzman invited her to join him in speaking to groups.
“I owed it to my family, to the survivors, to the 1 million who were killed, and because I didn’t want any of my friends to experience [what she and her family went through],” Murekatete said. She has since spoken to more than 300 groups around the world, often with Gewirtzman.
Milwaukeean Dan Kohl also sees strong connections between Murekatete’s experiences and the Holocaust. A board member of the American Jewish Committee-Milwaukee, which co-sponsored the evening, Kohl helped bring her to Milwaukee.
“As Jewish Americans we have a special duty to focus the world’s attention on issues of genocide and try to prevent future holocausts from happening,” he said.
AJC-Milwaukee director Harriet McKinney agreed. “When we say ‘never again,’ we mean it. As a people, we understand [genocide] better than others…. It behooves us to be more courageous and more visible, so it is not done again.”
As many say about the Holocaust, the world stood by and did nothing to stop the Rwandan genocide, Murekatete said.
“The entire genocide was aired on the CNN and BBC news,” she told the U.N. Chronicle in 2003. She was angry not just with the United Nations and the U.S., but also little countries that could have sent troops that would have stopped the murders.
Even more frustrating than the inaction were the diplomats and politicians who claimed they did not know the extent of the massacre. After speaking to the U.N. General Assembly in 2003, some diplomats approached her, apologized and said, “We haven’t done enough, we have failed you, but we are going to try and make sure that this does not happen again.”
Murekatete has devoted herself to that. In May, she started an initiative with the organization, Miracle Corners of the World, called Jacqueline’s Human Rights Corner. The initiative will include a genocide prevention curriculum aimed at showing people that genocide can happen “anywhere, to anyone,” she said.
We need to focus more on discrimination, racism, and anti-Semitism, she said. “If we do not address these problems … they can culminate in genocide.”
Her initiative is working on building a community center in Rwanda to help survivors of the genocide, and is coordinating a network of survivors of genocides in Bosnia, Cambodia, Rwanda and Darfur and the Holocaust. “It’s one thing to read a book [about genocide], it’s another to see a survivor” tell their story, she said.
Murekatete, who graduated cum laude from New York University last May, is close to finishing a book, which, she said, will include a foreword by Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Elie Wiesel. According to Murekatete, Wiesel is working on finding a publisher for her.
“Jacqueline’s message is one of triumph, courage, survival and hopefulness,” said McKinney.
In addition to the AJC, the event was sponsored by the Darfur Action Coalition of Wisconsin, African Student Association, UWM Union Sociocultural Programming, Women’s Resource Center, VOX: Voices for Planned Parenthood, Muslim Student Association.
To find out how to get involved, go to miraclecorners.org.
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