Wednesday, April 25 12:08 PM SGT

They made us feel sub-human: Rwandan genocide witness

BRUSSELS, April 25 (AFP) -

Decades before the 1994 Rwandan genocide an anti-Tutsi apartheid created a mind-set in school children that Tutsis were a sub-human class, a middle-aged Tutsi woman in tears told a jury in an historic trial here this week.

The system created both "censenting victims and potential executioners," the woman, who escaped the massacres, said as testimony got underway.

Four Rwandans, including two Roman Catholic nuns, are on trial for war crimes committed during the massacre of an estimated 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus in the central African state of Rwanda.

"Please forgive me if I cry. I will try to put the truth before the eyes of humanity," said Yolande Mukagasana, 47, who lost her husband and three children in the 1994 bloodbath by Hutu militias and extremists.

Discrimination against the Tutsis began in grade school, she said, when they were humiliated before their classmates by teachers explaining how to tell them apart from Rwandans. "In class, Odette (a Tutsi classmate) was very tall, very thin. I was very small," she told the jury. "We were put in front of the class to show that while the Tutsis were tall, there were exceptions and mistakes could be made."

Their teacher explained to the class there were other ways to distinguish Tutsis from Rwandans, the texture of their hair, for example. Mukagasana, the teacher showed the class, did not have the frizzy hair characteristic of Hutu Rwandans.

"The children gathered around us, ran their fingers through our hair. During recreation period, they made circles around us and hooted at us".

"We were made to think of ourselves as worthless, that the others were more intelligent. And it worked. We grew up, some of us consenting victims, others eventual executioners."

Yolande Mukagasana painted a chilling portrait of carefully constructed institutionalized hatred of the Tutsis, the principle victims of the genocide.

Vincent Ntezimana, 39, Alphonse Higaniro, 51, and Roman Catholic nuns Consolata Mukangango, 42, and Julienne Mukabutera, 36, have all pleaded not guilty to "serious violations of international humanitarian rights."

Their jury trial is being held here under a law that gives Belgian courts jurisdiction over human rights violations committed beyond its borders.

Belgium is the former colonial power in Rwanda.

"The problem," said Mukagasana, "went back to the day when the identity cards were created." "Can you remind us who created the identity card?" asked the chief judge. "It was the Belgian colonial administration," she said.

To establish its power, the Belgian colonizer instituted ethnic identity cards in 1933 with the designations "Hutu" and Tutsi," which did not previously exist and which officialized ethnic memberships.

After the Belgian authorities and the Catholic Church, which had backed the Tutsi monarchy, did an about-face towards the end of the 1950s and defended the Hutu "socialist revolution," the killing began, said the witness. "My husband was orphaned at the age of 13 by the Tutsi massacres in 1963," she said.

The prosecutor asked Mukagasana, "How did one become a 'consenting victim'?" Her answer: "When you see that all the media (referring to radio RTLM) are against you, you finally say to yourself, 'maybe I'm a discard of humanity. If I'm killed, maybe humanity will have peace." "That's the climate in which I grew up, the climate in which my children were killed with machetes," she said.

"And who were the executioners," asked the judge. "The executioners were our friends, our neighbors," she said. "I also met Tutsis who participated in the genocide, for fear of being killed themselves."

Yolande Mukagasana, now a resident of Belgium, said she has committed her life today to bearing witness to the genocide in her native land, to listening to other survivors. She has written a book entitled, "Death Doesn't Want Me," and is playing in a theatre production called "Rwanda 1994."

"We have the impression that the world has not understood anything of what happened," she said."It remains to be seen if it ever will."

Source:
http://asia.dailynews.yahoo.com/headlines/world/article.html?s=asia/headlines/010425/world/afp/They_made_us_feel_sub-human__Rwandan_genocide_witness.html