Lending a Voice to the Voiceless: The Quest for Justice in Umutesi's Narrative

Surviving the Slaughter is a powerful narrative that takes us into one of the many tragedies of the African Great Lakes region that affected tens of thousands of helpless Rwandan civilians in the aftermath of the 1994 genocide inside Rwanda. Through the eyes of an ordinary, but also remarkable, woman, we learn the horrifying details of the ordeals that Rwandan refugees in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) went through after their camps were destroyed manu militari. The value of this book goes beyond that of a simple narrative. As we read it, we are absorbed by an account of a breathtaking and excruciating journey of tens of thousands of people as they are hunted down in the dense rainforests of the Congo. At the core of this account is one woman's protest against the absurdity of mass violence and the inhuman brutality of military regimes.

At first glance, the book stands out as a strong stand against the corrosive tradition of silence that often accompanies gross violations of human rights, especially those unfolding beyond the scrutiny of the major world media. In a simple but engaging style, Umutesi strips off the usual veneer of reserve that characterizes Rwandans in general and Rwandan women in particular. Rwandans don't usually talk about their experiences, let alone write about them. And writing about the plight of people whom the world has often considered pariahs since the 1994 genocide requires a strong personality.

Umutesi offers us a vivid account of the grueling nightmare experienced by tens of thousands of Rwandan civilians whom the world had deliberately forsaken. They are on a trek that seemingly has no end, heading for a destination unknown to them, with only a glimmer of hope that the sun of peace will rise once again. They endure countless death traps that no one will ever bother to denounce. Umutesi struggled to survive so that she could shame the insensitive world for its complacent attitudes in the face of human tragedies. She was spared by the forces of fate to tell the story of world complicity and cry out against one of the most scandalous humanitarian failures.

Those who dared raise their voices were few. A Rwandan proverb reminds us that "the hardship of the night can only be highlighted by a night-walker." No one could have better described what became of the "U.N.-protected" camps of Bukavu and Goma than a former dweller in one of these camps. Umutesi's experience as a survivor who never gave in to feelings of abandonment and despair leaves us with an important lesson: Evil can be challenged, even when it operates under the cover of the world's indifference. But struggling to survive was one thing and writing about the lived experience was another. One should not doubt that Umutesi faces great personal risk by writing a memoir about an episode of the Rwandan tragedy that was meant to decompose in the depth of Congo's forests like the many victims the tragedy had buried there.

The absurdity of the killings Umutesi writes about is reflected in the human tendency to place the label of pariah on a whole refugee population and then turn a blind eye on the inhuman treatment they are forced to bear. Umutesi does not deny that those fleeing the slaughter included criminals close to the Interahamwe militia who a couple of years before had been instrumental in executing the most horrendous genocide of the twentieth century in Rwanda. Nonetheless, by promoting the lie that all genuine refugees had returned to Rwanda and that only gangs of génocidaires were wandering in the rain forests of the Congo, the advocates of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), which was the major force attacking the refugees, managed to keep at bay any possibility of humanitarian intervention. As Umutesi's narrative makes clear, those caught up in this slaughter, much like the victims of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, were mostly ordinary peasants and helpless women and children who had no criminal history...