My brother slaughtered my husband and six children but I have forgiven him... I needed to heal
I can say I love my brother and he is also my friend MONICA KAMBBI ON FORGIVING KILLER SIBLING I was holding them, kissing them, telling them they were going to another life MONICA KAMBBI ON WATCHING HER SIX YOUNG CHILDREN DIE IN AGONY
Monica Kambbi lives every day tormented by a scene too horrific to comprehend. Her six young children, lying in the red Rwandan dirt being beaten with wooden clubs, spiked with nails, and whimpering for hours before they died.
She is haunted by their suffering and that she was helpless to save them. All she could do was go from child to child, holding their hands, assuring them they were going to “another life”.
Monica must also somehow live with the knowledge that two of the men in the mob who murdered her children with such unspeakable brutality were her own brothers.
It is 25 years since the genocide, surely not long enough to even contemplate forgiveness – let alone if the killers were your flesh and blood.
Yet, sitting on a rock in front of her mud home, Monica, 57, introduces me to one of the brothers, Paul Twahirwa, 50, who sits down beside us.
She says: “I can say I love my brother, and he is also my friend.”
Paul approaches me stiffly, keeping his head bowed as he offers a hand, which I am loathe to shake. But with Monica, he has an easy rapport, putting his arm around her thin shoulders as she recalls fondly how she carried him on those shoulders as a girl.
She says: “I never thought I could talk to him again, when I looked in his eyes I could see it all – but I had to.
“I needed to heal. Even now hearing him talk about it is...” she pauses. “I don’t forget, but I forgive.” Almost a million people were murdered in just 100 days between April and July 1994, the Hutus slaughtering Tutsis, even when they were family. Monica, like her brothers, is Hutu, but her
husband, who was also killed, was Tutsi, which meant her children were too. When the violence reached their home in the southern province, Monica’s husband and their children, Immable, 14, Maria, 12, Cloude, 10, Antonnate, eight, Canisius, six and John, three, became a target for militias. Paul, a carpenter, maintains he never hated Tutsis, but shamefully recalls how he caved in to pressure and fear. He says: “Officials were going door to door, telling us even a Tutsi who was our own child would be our enemy, and that if we didn’t kill, we would be killed.” He joined the militias and other locals and beat Monica’s husband to death before tracking her and the children to the hilltop where they were cowering,
trying to hide. Protected by her Hutu status, Monica had to watch as her Tutsi children were slaughtered by their uncles. Paul says he “felt numb”, as if the mob mentality had dulled his senses. “I was sober,” he says when I ask, dearly wishing he was not.
He adds: “I loved those children, but in that moment I had no feeling for them. The group was crazy. Immediately, I was ashamed, they were my nephews, my niece.”
Monica recalls trying to comfort her dying children in the aftermath: “I was holding them, kissing them, telling them they were going to another life. I waited a long time until they died. Then I dragged branches and laid them on top of their bodies.”
As the siblings sit together, reliving that most terrible of days, night has fallen. In the darkness, we hear a wailing, like a wounded animal. A neighbour had been listening, and become traumatised, her own grief still raw.
After the killings, Monica fled to a refugee camp and when she returned home a year later, Paul was in prison. He was released after 10 years when he confessed and begged contrition, and now lives in Monica’s village with his own family. The other brother, Charles, has never confessed and is still in jail.
Monica was left traumatised and homeless by the killings and ended up sleeping rough, with an alcohol addiction. Reconciling with Paul has helped her turn her life around.
That was made possible by a “Dialogue club” run by peacekeeping charity International Alert, who began bringing perpetrators and victims here together in 2007 and now help 50,000 people.
Manager Betty Mutesi says the clubs were not always well received. She says: “Organisations were working with perpetrators and survivors separately. They were shocked we were forcing reconciliation.
“But people meet in markets or church anyway – it is better to prepare them.”
Initially, Monica refused to attend, but Paul
persisted and they had counselling. Monica eventually allowed him to build her a home.
I go to one of the group’s meetings, which takes place under a gnarled tree.
I meet Jean Baptiste Sirwenda, 66, who admits he supervised the killing here.
The woman sitting beside him, Agnes Nibibuka, 50, was bound and thrown into the river under his watch. By a miracle, Agnes survived. The two are now on good terms.
Susan Nyilandaeme, 63, whose sons, 14 and 10, were killed and never found, struggles
more to forgive. She believes Paul knows where they are. Their exchange is painful, but they speak openly. She tells him: “We say, ‘We forgive you.’ But still you keep mum.”
He replies, quietly: “If I had information, I would tell you.”
It is the young who must be helped to forgive if tensions between Tutsis and Hutus are never to rise again.
Emmanuel Bampiriye, 24, is one of around 20,000 children here born of genocide rape, suffered by 250,000 women. He lives with his
Tutsi mother, Marie, and has only seen his Hutu father, released from prison four years ago, once, on the street. They did not speak.
Emmanuel is now considering approaching him, and tells me: “I feel the guilt of my father. If he asked for my forgiveness, I would forgive him. I feel that would help me shed the guilt which I carry.”
But Emmanuel is very clear – he is neither Tutsi nor Hutu, only Rwandan.