Monday afternoon rant: is cultural destruction in the 21st century inevitable?

by Marc Masurovsky

Palmyra

 As the world sits by and watches ISIS forces overwhelm the town of Palmyra, shudders go down our collective spines and dread overcomes us as we wonder: what will the fundamentalist warriors of the Daesh do to the archaeological treasures that lie beneath the surface of Palmyra?

"cradle of civilization"

The so-called “cradle of civilization” that we all grew up with has survived assaults for thousands of years, stemming from the rise and fall of previous caliphates, kingdoms and empires vying for influence in the Crescent.

The US Congress is readying to pass a law that enshrines an organic connection between national security and cultural heritage. If the law passes, the US will appoint, at no extra cost to the US treasury, an international coordinator whose job it will be to stay on top of the constant assaults against culture in conflict zones at the hands of “terrorists” and assess how those acts affect American national security and evaluate strategies on how to counter those assaults.  It is undeniable progress that the debate over cultural heritage has led to the explicit necessity to coordinate international efforts to protect cultural sites from destruction wrought by armed maniacs.

The secretary general of UNESCO, Irina Bokova, has shared her outrage about the events unfolding in war-battered Syria and its neighbor, Irak. How bad does it have to get when governments allow themselves to be eaten up alive and watch the legacies of thousands of years of culture vanish before their eyes on their own territories? Worse. What does it say about them? What does it say about us?

What does outrage alone do to stem the tide of destruction?

The German Minister of Culture, Monika Gruetters, expressed her own dismay that Germany had become a turnstile for “conflict antiquities” streaming from areas controlled by ISIS and other zones under the control of armed groups in the Mideast. She went as far as threaten to regulate the trade in antiquities by requiring a complete and detailed provenance for each item entering or exiting Germany, an effort that could lead to placing a chokehold on the illicit trade in “conflict antiquities” at least in Germany.

The trade has responded in kind reiterating its oft-proffered self-serving defense that it can police itself and its members are honorable and would never trade in anything illicit. If not them, who is?

We know by now that the global trade in looted antiquities operates on the same principle as the international narcotics trade. Where there is a demand, there is a ready supply. You don’t need to be a rocket scientist or a CIA hack or privy to the world’s darkest secrets to understand this truism. Why would anyone dig holes in the ground, extract from their matrix priceless artifacts that could help us understand the societies that produced them and for the thieves to go through all sorts of extra-legal gymnastics just to find out that there are no buyers? Most are not trained archaeologists, they seem to be guided by “scientists” and “experts”. They are under contract to perform a task whose aim is to supply looted antiquities in exchange for badly-needed money.

As it turns out, those who acquire looted antiquities are everywhere, the market can barely keep up with the demand from individuals with disposable incomes and deep pockets worldwide, generalists and specialists alike, who want these objects for reasons that we need not go into here. The international art trade and the antiquities market are fueling in part the ISIS strategy to overtake archaeological sites and pillage them, much like Chinese officials, desirous to sate their citizens' apparent addiction to ivory, are commandeering the mass killings of elephants and rhinoceroses in Africa.  Contract killing to fuel addictions with no regard for the environment and no respect for life on earth.  Like all addictions, they spread calamity everywhere. The collateral damage is irreversible.

What will the Chinese do when there are no sources of organic ivory left?

What happens when all the antiquities have been extracted? Will ISIS push into other countries like locusts and harvest more antiquities?

What kind of a world do we live in which tolerates such abuses? It’s as if history does not matter, we don’t matter anymore. Since the Nazi period, humankind has become far less human and has descended into a numbing tolerance and acceptance of the worst abuses that people could dream up against others. Actually, it’s not clear anymore what the word “human” actually means.

It’s as if the past does not count any longer except for the messages and images that ooze through our smartphones or other digital pop culture delivery mechanisms. There will always be pictures of Palmyra to enjoy and glean in quiet admiration and respect for what once was and is no longer. Sigh! So should we weep if the real thing disappears? After all, we always have Instagram.

Cowardice, cynicism and indifference fuel the ISIS strategy. The ISIS bullies on the Middle Eastern block are winning because they are well aware of our own impotence to act, much like the Serbian forces did during the Bosnia crisis of the early 1990s and the orchestrators of the genocide in Rwanda  in spring 1994, to name but a few human rights disasters, no, human, man-made disasters.

Perhaps history does not count anymore. Let’s just watch Palmyra turn into Swiss cheese and explain to the children that it’s ok.

If Palmyra does disappear or is transformed into a maze of mole-like tunnels denoting systematic looting, we all let it happen.  Is it logical then to promote armed intervention as the only viable solution to protect Palmyra and other remnants of the “cradle of civilization”?  Are we ready to die for the cause of world culture and our past heritage?

We have reached a breaking point where our current national leaders the world over do not want to risk global war over the destruction of cultural sites but they sure are willing to do so because one country might or might not have a nuclear bomb.

None of this makes any sense.

Let’s drink some tea, play cards, watch the sun set and indulge in idle chatter. It’s safer that way.

Or let's act. But how?

Murambi: a death camp by any other name

by Marc Masurovsky

The Murambi memorial site is, literally, in the middle of nowhere.

view of the entrance to Murambi

After reaching Butare, the second largest city in Rwanda, you take a side road that extends for 27 km, along a dirt road, winding round villages where the unfamiliar Muzungu (roughly translated as “lost and confused” to designate white foreigners) stand out like sore thumbs. No matter. Stares accompany us with the occasional motley crew of boys on bicycles trying to steer us in the right direction in exchange for coins.

We finally reach Murambi, at a dead end. The road goes nowhere else. That ought to tell you something already. A finality in and of itself. The memorial site is surrounded by villages comprised of a dozen huts and houses each, made out of the proverbial mud brick and found materials stitched together to produce a semblance of shelter.

Nothing prepares you for Murambi in the same manner as nothing can prepare you for Birkenau. The only difference is that the horror of Murambi is hiding in plain sight, whereas the horror of Birkenau is a horror left to the imagination to toggle and to sift through once the landscape of dying and suffering has been explored.

Murambi is a place flanked by bucolic landscapes of rolling hills, verdant sceneries, much like the rest of Southern Rwanda. At this place, tens of thousands of Tutsi civilians from surrounding areas were corralled to await their fate.

There are building structures at Murambi, red brick shells that look more like barracks than classrooms for a future state technical training center that was never completed, so goes the official story. One can only imagine young men and women studying to be the future engineers and technicians of a modern Rwanda at the end of a dead-end road far from everything and flanked by dead poor villages with no commercial infrastructure to support such a technical center. The story makes no sense. By default, we are left to speculate and to leave open the possibility that our worst thoughts are closer to the truth than the official “spin” of an unfinished school. Let’s say, for a moment, that there was such a plan to build a school in the middle of nowhere, difficult to reach, and that the project was nixed for one reason or another. If that were the case, the abandoned red brick shells constituted the proper edifice in which to park men, women, and children, who had reached—in more ways than one—the end of their road.

Murambi became a killing ground where every square inch was used to hack, shoot, dismember, rape, and murder men, women and children. No one is sure about the numbers, but 20,000 is the minimal safe number. Some speak of as many as 55,000 bodies buried at Murambi.

The memorial building itself houses an exhibit that resembles the one housed in Kigali, Rwanda’s capital. Nothing new to offer. The only interesting presence is the absence of bodies from casings inset in the floor covered by clear panels in which were supposed to be displayed the remains (or whatever is left of the remains in their accelerated state of deterioration) of men, women, and children, frozen in the position that they yielded to as they exhaled their last breath.

Several barracks house the remains of approximately 1500 people who were disinterred from mass graves and put on display. The corpses of the victims are lying on wooden racks atop improvised platforms in successive rooms. Children with one arm extending over the corpse of an adult man or woman, adults with a finger pointing nowhere as if they had tried in vain to dissuade their attackers from hacking them into death, children with smashed skulls, women with small patches of hair still clinging to the thin skin layer peeling off their skulls, children curled up as if trying to get some sleep. It is all so poignant and yet so desensitizing to be faced with the final moments of Tutsi victims’ lives, frozen as their bodies desiccate and gradually vanish at the relentless mercy of the elements.

We climb up some steps and enter another part of this desolate site where ghosts abound.

 

As we walk through the grass and in between neatly laid out rows of red brick barracks, a flash memory crosses our minds as we recognize some of the timeless architectural elements of a Nazi concentration camp. We enter one of the barracks. Some walls show evidence of bullet impacts. But the most striking feature of these rooms is their redness, red from the dust of the rich loam that covers Rwandan fields blending with the fading dark red stains left by victims’ blood, spilled on the floors and splattered on the walls. Those who maintain the site tried in vain to eliminate all traces of the blood and one can see the crude brush strokes of off-white paint splashed on the walls as added evidence of the grisly nature of these rooms. Death rooms, hacking rooms, rooms of torture and unremitting, cruel death. These rooms succeed themselves one after another and one should not even try to imagine what took place there as thousands of human beings were crammed into them, awaiting their fate, hungry and thirsty and panicked.

Victims' belongings, in the background, the  killing rooms

In some of the rooms, teenagers and adults living in the villages surrounding the memorial site have scrawled haphazard designs of cars and planes, words and sentences in Kinyarwanda. One can only wonder if they were even mildly aware of the function of these rooms. A form of unwitting desecration has taken place at Murambi. The sheer state of neglect that prevails at this death camp is simply unacceptable.

One can only hope that the Rwandan government will take urgent measures to rectify the situation, secure these killing rooms, stabilize the remains of the victims, perhaps rebury them in a dignified way so as to memorialize them the way that most people honor their dead and, just as important, recount the story of Murambi so that the visitor is not left to her own imagination to understand what happened in that hellish space.

Murambi is a death camp where breathing is labored, the mind goes numb, and death hangs in the suffocating air amid fields, rolling hills and the banality of human survival and existence in a forgotten corner of Rwanda.

The neighborhood of Murambi

Letter from Nyamata genocide memorial, outside Kigali, Rwanda.

by Marc Masurovsky

Entrance to Nyamata Genocide Memorial

The skulls and bones of more than 10,000 Tutsi murdered at Nyamata (45,000 remains are buried there from other killing sites) lie in this Catholic compound-men, women, children, infants and newborns. Their tattered clothes, covered with dried up blood, are piled in heaps atop wooden benches inside the church where people once prayed and where frightened Tutsi sought sanctuary in the bosom of the Church that they had embraced as good Catholics.


The clothes bear witness to their failure to be heard and to the failure of the Church to protect them.

Inside the church at Nyamata

The Catholic Church in Rwanda ate up its flock. Churches became killing grounds favored by Hutu militiamen and Rwandan soldiers. Hutu priests and nuns went after their Tutsi colleagues, without mercy, and handed over their Tutsi flock to their butchers.

There are bullet holes everywhere inside the Nyamata church, including through the roof. The light comes through like narrow beams.


To Hutu militiamen, the Virgin Mary was a Tutsi because of her looks-tall and elongated face, slender bones. The Hutu militia shot her and busted her left plaster shoulder. Guilty as charged.


Jesus Christ? Get Him out of the church so that He cannot side with the victims.

The tabernacle inside Nyamata Church

The Hutu shot bullets into a tabernacle, thinking that it would be sufficient to drive Jesus out.

God? The militia invoked (their) God to justify the eradication of the Tutsi saying that (their) God wanted revenge against the Tutsi.

Deaths by the thousands inside a packed church.

Skulls of Tutsi victims inside burial crypt

Once upon a time, a young Tutsi woman rejected the advances of young Hutu men. Then came the genocide. On April 13, 1994, Hutu militia reached Nyamata, on the outskirts of Kigali and the spurned Hutu men sought revenge against the young Tutsi woman who had rejected their advances. Were they her friends or just neighborhood acquaintances?

I don’t know how many of these boys there were but it must have been a pack of them who violated her. According to one source, there were 20 of them. Her name was Annonciata Mukandoli. She was 28 years old.

Based on the story told at the memorial, the young Tutsi woman was wounded, she was repeatedly raped, she was killed, her corpse was tortured (does torture still exist after death?). Then came the final act. The Hutu men drove a stake through her vagina as far as they could. Was their quest for revenge finally sated?

Instruments of death used against Tutsi at Nyamata

What is left of her rests inside a coffin in a specially-built crypt beneath the church floor. It is draped in a white cloth, a large wooden cross lain across it.

Annunciata's final resting place in the crypt of Nyamata

Physical violence, sexual violations, death, postmortem defilements and impalement. Is there a name for such behavior?

Why is there room for it amongst us, despite us?

The guide explained that the young men’s behavior could be attributed to brainwashing. Here I disagree. That would mean that one is not responsible for one’s actions. Perhaps, brainwashing is a diagnosis that makes it possible to conduct a form of spiritual exorcism, getting the devil out of you, the same one who made you impale a young woman just because she would not accept your sexual advances.

I frankly don’t believe in brainwashing. I don’t believe that the dog made them do it. If mass murder accompanied by violations and defilements of the human body is an expression of dissociative disorder or some other serious psychological condition, we need to seriously wonder who we are and what makes us tick. Failing any psycho-medical assessment of the genocidal personality, you end up believing in your own idols and you act accordingly. Willing the death of another human being is exactly that: an act of will, which means that, as a sentient creature, you decide to kill. You decide to defile. You decide to maim. You decide to violate and to rape. The devil did not make you do it. You made that decision. After thousands of years, the mystery remains whole: how to prevent such acts from ever taking place.

And yet, in an unprecedented feat of national post-genocide healing in Rwanda known as the Gacaca* (named after the short, thick grass on which villagers sat to attend these "trials", which lasted close to 12 years), tens of thousands of Hutu killers and rapists have reconciled with their surviving Tutsi victims after undergoing a very complex process, often painful and difficult, for all parties, but especially for the victims.  A number of the reconciled have even become close friends. Contrition, forgiveness and reconciliation on a national scale is unprecedented in the annals of modern history, let alone in the era of genocides. Such an outcome was inconceivable in post-Holocaust Europe, in post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia, in Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia after 1993. We need to understand why.

What does that say about us, as human beings? Is Rwanda an anomaly or can there truly be forgiveness and reconciliation after a crime of genocide, regardless of where it occurs?

Still, the story of human beings’ presence on Earth is soaked in blood. Grim as it is, we coexist with those who thirst to see blood spill on the ground for reasons all their own. It is the phantasmagoria called life.

For more on the reconciliation process, go to http://www.reach-rwanda.org, and the work of the REACH organization in Rwanda.

For more on the Gacaca, go to
http://www.genocidearchiverwanda.org.rw/index.php/Category:Gacaca_Court_Proceedings
http://www.gacacafilms.com

The Gacaca Archives are presently closed to the public. They are under the supervision of the CNLG (National Commission for the Fight against Genocide) and are being physically stored in the facilities of the Rwandan National Police.  There is currently underway an effort to organize these extraordinary archives. They hold an estimated 60 million pages of testimonials and rulings administered throughout post-genocide Rwanda.  These archives contain the memory of Rwanda past and future.

Rwanda: Art in a post-genocide society

by Marc Masurovsky

By all accounts, there is no reason why artistic activity should have even found a haven in a society where half of the minority Tutsi population was hacked, stabbed, impaled, shot, sexually assaulted, enslaved, raped and otherwise martyred by Hutu extremists more than 20 years ago.

Rwanda is a nation whose post-genocide population is afflicted by collective post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) of the worst kind, something that is not cured by heavy doses of synthetic drugs which would serve as mere palliatives. As one cynical researcher observed who is very familiar with Rwanda, if you suffer from PTSD, Rwanda will make you feel like you are normal.

View of Kigali

If anything, the process of creating a work of art, an object of art, either two dimensional or three-dimensional, might be viewed more as a therapeutic exercise aimed at exorcising the demons of a genocidal enterprise anchored in neighborhood kinship ties.

And yet…Rwanda has emerged from its own version of hell on earth to become a society desperate to thrive and to show its best side to itself and the world.

Detail, Ivuka Arts Center, Kigali

One example of that miraculous turnabout are the artistic outputs produced largely by self-taught painters and sculptors. As some of these artists have indicated, at the very beginning of this creative process, there was no artistic activity to speak of in Rwanda. Nothing. Nada. But at the onset of the 21st century, several arts centers like Ivuka and then Inema emerged in Kigali from the aftershock of the genocide. They operated as havens of expression, free expression for those who desired it. Mostly, the children came, those who lost everything, their parents, their siblings, their friends, their relatives, their neighbors. With no one to turn to, some of these children found solace in the idea of daubing paint on a canvas and allowing their scarred minds to free up some of the light buried deep inside, that shimmer which contained their innocence and their identity as independent beings striving for a place in the world, a cruel one at that, who once played and imagined.

Ivuka Arts Studio, Kigali

Detail from a child's painting, Inema Art Center, Kigali

Group painting at Inema Art Center, Kigali

Bit by bit, canvas after canvas, these children have grown up feeling a bit less shackled to their past and looking forward to learn, discover and think about a future free of machetes, spears, and other sordid implements of torture, defacement, and death. Their palette has shifted from dark browns, greens and grey, to more vibrant colors, sometimes expressionist without knowing what that means.

Detail, Ivuka Arts Center, Kigali

Many of today's artists in Rwanda's capital, Kigali, the locus of Rwanda's art scene, have tapped their inner beings for inspiration and have not sought inspiration outside the borders of their nation.

Let's not forget the surviving Tutsi women of Rwanda who were enslaved sometimes for weeks on end, abused, tortured, raped, violated, and who somehow were able to make it out of the abyss in which they had been cast simply for being Tutsi (a number of Hutu women suffered equally because of their kinship ties to Tutsis).

Their recovery has been nothing short of unbelievable. But one has to credit a massive collective effort engineered by the leadership of post-1994 Rwanda to bring about stability and self-respect in all the communities that make up this small country surrounded by self-interested nations which have only profited from the turmoil exacerbated by the former colonial powers that controlled at one time or another Rwanda, namely Germany, Belgium, and France.

The surviving Tutsi women and their daughters are deeply scarred, in such a way that one can wonder if they can fully function. But Rwanda’s miracle is to have produced an environment in which they can find themselves again despite the pain of having to know that their torturers live not too far from them.

As we celebrate International Women’s Day on March 8, let’s pay a special tribute to the women of Rwanda, to their resilience, to their internal beauty of mind and spirit, for having had the courage and strength to help keep alive and tightly woven the fabric of Rwandan civil society.

Plunder of culture

The plunder of culture is a crime against humanity. And the right to culture is a human right. Since the dawn of ages, men and women have defined themselves in part by leaving cultural and aesthetic tracks behind, a reminder of their identity as humans. It is a fitting and inalienable human trait to shape for others to see and judge and appreciate what we call “culture”. Its forcible removal and attempted elimination through misappropriation and destruction as during the Holocaust are therefore a crime against us all, as individuals and as members of collectivities and groups defined by language, geography, and belief systems.