‘The world watched’: Witnessing Genocide

Abstract

Between April and May of 1994 around one million Rwandans, mostly Tutsi at the hands of Hutu, were killed in waves of massacres that erupted throughout the country. Coming at the close of the twentieth century, the genocidal event shocked with its vicious brutality and the sense in which it undermined the rhetorical promise of ‘never again’, which followed the Holocaust. Paul Kagame, leader of the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front and then president of Rwanda famously commented, ‘never again became wherever again’ (qtd. in Mirzoeff, ‘Empire of Camps’ 23). The unwillingness of international forces to intervene despite the colonial roots of the conflict, coupled with the notorious withdrawal of the UN on the eve of the massacres, set the stage for a genocide that continues to haunt both African and Western consciousness. This chapter returns to the question of witness and to the ways in which spectators are asked to be present to genocide as either tourists or members of a theatre audience. In stark contrast with the memorials marked by absent bodies in earlier chapters, and the presence of Māori performers discussed in the previous one, this chapter contemplates the affects of the physical presence of the dead at Murambi Genocide Memorial Centre, where preserved corpses are put on display. Rwanda’s memorials to 1994 are a demonstration of the country’s commitment to remembering and is usefully described by Nicholas Mirzoeff as a ‘performative network of visibility’ (‘Invisible Again’ 1).

In representing genocide, we need to take great care that we are not trading on the double delight of witness to suffering — the enjoyment through moral filters of proxied power (and on the other side, moral surrender — the wish to be taken — to be taken from accountability); also the self-reward of a kind of colonial empathy — where the subject of witness becomes the virtue of the witness (replacing the suffering of what we see with the suffering of our seeing…).

Erik Ehn, ‘Witness as Torture’