Garments recovered from crushed bodies found in burial holes are the reminder of a terrible slaughter
Across the red earth, they snake like washing lines. Strings sagging under the weight of clothes. But these rows of trousers, patterned dresses, children’s hoodies, a babygrow depicting snowmen, are far from clean. They are stiff with dried mud, sweat, and blood. They are the clothes of the dead. The endless lines serve a vital purpose in the most devastating identification parade.
This weekend marks 25 years since the start of the 100-day genocide that saw nearly one million people slaughtered in Rwanda.
Yet bodies are only now being discovered on this site in the Kicukiro district of the country’s capital Kigali.
Mounds of shattered bones, splintered like rubble from being crushed into secret 25ft-deep burial holes. They remained hidden until last year under houses hastily erected by the killers.
The remains of some 62,000 victims have been exhumed so far from these black pits.
There is no DNA system to identify victims, the task is too vast, too complex and too costly.
The only means mourners have of at least being sure their family’s bones are here is if an identification card is found or if they are able to recognise the clothes their relative was wearing as they fled.
The garments hanging here
floated to the top of the horror holes as the bodies sank.
Antoinette Murebwayire, 38, hunched with the weight of her grief, scours for anything she recognises. “I have come almost every day, I walk along the lines,” she says.
Pointing to a tiny pink sweater, she adds: “The first clothes I found were my three-year-old cousin’s.
“I remember her clearly as my aunt was carrying her on her back.
“I am still looking for my parents’ clothes.”
Antoinette, then a 14-year-old orphan, survived the genocide by hiding in bushes.
Some 30 members of her family EMMANUEL NDUWAYEZU IBUKA SURVIVORS GROUP Baby cups, top, were found. Above: Godance stands at the casket of her three sons did not make it and their remains are probably here.
She is one of around 50 to make an identification so far.
But there is another reason why these ragged garments are hanging here: To provide proof.
There are those who still deny the genocide. And because so many of the bones are smashed, some deny they are human.
As this land once bordered an airstrip, the guise of “security” kept its secret hidden. Few knew what happened here until one perpetrator came forward last year.
Emmanuel Nduwayezu, from Ibuka, a survivors’ organisation, gestures angrily to the lines and explains: “There are those who claim the bones belong to cattle.
“But these are people’s clothes. It is real. I want the world to know.”
Antoinette says: “Only seeing will stop this happening again,”
Rwanda’s government has worked unceasingly to stop anything close to a repeat of the genocide since current president, Paul Kagame, led the Rwandan Patriotic Front into the country, forcing the killers to disperse.
Ethnic divisions culminated in 1994’s slaughter by mainly Hutus of their Tutsi rivals, a hatred that was deeply ingrained.
There are those who claim the bones belong to cattle
The assassination of the country’s then Hutu President Juvenal Habyarimana, whose plane was shot down above Kigali airport on April 6, 1994, may have triggered the frenzied killing.
But the tensions had been building for decades. The killing fields we stand on saw their first murders in 1992.
Stating ethnicity on an ID card is now banned and discrimination carries a hefty sentence.
Kagame’s government
leads