"At Nyarubuye, tiny skulls of children were scattered here and there, and from a nearby schoolyard the voices of their former classmates at recess carried into the church. Inside the nave, empty and grand, where a dark powder of dried blood marked one's footprints, a single, representative corpse was left on the floor before the altar. He appeared to be crawling toward the confession booth. His feet had been chopped off, his hands had been chopped off. This was a favorite torture for Tutsis during the genocide; the idea was to cut the tall people 'down to size'; and crowds would gather to taunt, laugh, and cheer as the victim writhed to death. The bones emerged from the dead man's cuffs like twigs, and he still had a square tuft of hair peeling from his skull, and a perfectly formed, weather-shrunken and weather-greened ear.
'Look at his feet and his hands.' said Sergeant Francis. 'How he must have suffered.'
But what of his suffering? The young man in the car wreck had suffered, albeit for an instant, and the people at Kibeho had suffered. What does suffering have to do with genocide, when the idea itself is the crime?"
We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with out families,
Stories From Rwanda
By Phillip Gourevitch
