Crimes

Church History

With Brent that day were Marek Pazik and Stefan Stec, both polish officers who had briefly been billeted in the Gikondo Parish Church, known as the Polish Mission because it was run by priests from Poland.

Pazik and Stec did not last long under the austere regime at the mission, but two of their fellow Polish MILOBs had stayed on.

That morning, a faint call had come from the men at the mission begging for help.

The batteries on the radio were dying and all Brent could make out was that there had been killings at the church.

Not knowing what to expect, Brent, Pazik, and Stec armed themselves and, hatches down, set off to Gikondo in the APC with a Bangladeshi officer and three men.

Along the route, they passed through fighting between the RGF and the RPF, through Gendarmerie roadblocks and through ever-increasing and chaotic militia roadblocks.

They saw the bodies of men, women, and children near these roadblocks.

So many civilians were on the move, it looked like the entire population was abandoning Kigali.

At the church, they came to a halt and dismounted.

Pazik and a Bangladeshi soldier went to the rectory to find the Polish MILOBs, while Brent and Stec confronted the first evidence of wholesale massacre.

Across the street from the mission, an entire alleyway was littered with the bodies of women and children near a hastily abandoned school.

As Brent and Stec were standing there trying to take the number of bodies, a truck full of armed men roared by

Brent and Stec decided to head for the church

Stec went inside while Brent stood by the door to cover him and to keep the APC in sight

They confronted a scene of unbelievable horror – the first such scene UNAMIR witnessed – evidence of genocide, though we didn’t yet know to call it that

In the aisles and on the pews were the bodies of hundreds of men, women, and children

At least fifteen of them were still alive but in a terrible state

The priests were applying first aid to the survivors

A baby cried as it tried to feed on the breast of its dead mother, a sight Brent has never forgotten

Pazik found the two Polish MILOBs, who were in a state of grief and shock, hardly able to relate what had happened

The night before, they said, the RGF had cordoned off the area, and then the Gendarmerie had gone door to door checking identity cards

All Tutsi men, women, and children were rounded up and moved to the church

Their screams alerted the priests and the MILOBs, who had come running

The priests and officers were seized at the church doors and slammed up against the wall with rifle barrels at their throats

They were forced to watch at gunpoint as the gendarmes collected the adults’ identity cards and burned them

Then the gendarmes welcomed in a large number of civilian militiamen with machetes and handed over the victims to their killers

Methodically and with much bravado and laughter, the militia moved from bench to bench, hacking with machetes

Some people died immediately, while others with terrible wounds begged for their lives or the lives of their children

No one was spared

A pregnant woman was disemboweled and her fetus severed

Women suffered horrible mutilation

Men were struck on the head and died immediately or lingered in agony

Children begged for their lives and received the same treatment as their parents

Genitalia were a favorite target, the victims left to bleed to death

There was no mercy, no hesitation, and no compassion

The priests and MILOBs, guns at their throats, tears in their eyes, and the scream of the dying in their ears, pleased with the gendarmes for the victims

The gendarme's reply was to use the rifle barrels to lift the priests’ and MILOBs’ heads so that they could better witness the horror

Killing with machetes is hard work, and sometime in the night the murderers became fatigued with their gruesome task and left the church, probably headed for some sleep before they moved on to the next location

The priests and MILOBs did what they could for the few survivors, who moaned or crawled from underneath the corpses that had sheltered them

Both of the MILOBs were overwhelmed by emotion as they recounted the night’s events

One fell completely silent while the other admitted that though he had served in places, such as Iraq and Cambodia, this was it, he was going home

The men needed to get out of there, to get back to the security of headquarters and regain their equilibrium, and they urged the priests to join them

But the fathers refused, saying they had to stay with the wounded, who were too many to carry in the APC

Brent and the others gave the priests a radio and a charged battery, what water they had and a small first aid kit, and promised to report the incident and mount a rescue mission

They warned the priests that since it was already mid-afternoon, it was unlikely that a large armed escort with ambulances or heavy transport could be mounted and then negotiate the dozens of roadblocks before nightfall, but the priests were confident they could hide overnight, as the militia and gendarmes had surely finished with them

Feeling like deserters, the UNAMIR group returned to Force HQ, and the Polish MILOBs were put to bed. 

Kigali sector was directed to conduct a rescue mission, but as Brent had suspected, it couldn’t comply until the next day – dozens of missions were already underway.

Early the next morning, the priests called on the radio and reported that the militia had returned during the night.

Our APC had been spotted at the church, and the killers had returned to destroy the evidence of the massacre.

They had killed the wounded and removed and burned the bodies.

The decision to leave the priests and the victims had disastrous consequences, but such are the decisions that soldiers make in war.

Some days you make decisions and people live, other days people die.

Those innocent men, women, and children were simply Tutsi.

That was their crime.

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Real Crisis Responses

Food

In North Carolina, the economic suffering of citizens by 1862 reached such proportions that county officials implemented elaborate new mechanisms to meet their basic dietary needs.
The crisis overwhelmed traditional public and private aid efforts, leading to a sharp break with past notions about government involvement in the economy.
In Virginia, the shortage of food in towns and cities became so serious by 1864 that Governor William Smith asked the state legislature to appropriate funds to buy and transport food to the needy communities.
When the legislature refused, Smith dipped into his contingency funds, took out a personal loan, and managed to come up with $110,000 to hire a fleet of blockade runners and begin trading for supplies.
Blockade running became too dangerous, but the resourceful governor confiscated a railroad train in the name of the state to facilitate his purchase of food supplies inland.
His operation became so successful that he was able, in his words, "to make occasional loans to the Confederate Government."
As food became increasingly scarce, riots erupted throughout the urban South, disclosing conflicts and resentments that had remained below the surface before the firing on Fort Sumter.
Women, who experienced the hunger of their children and families most directly, led many of these food riots, the best known of which was the uprising in the Confederate capital of Richmond on April 2, 1863.
Similar protests occurred in small towns such as Salisbury, North Carolina where a highly disciplined group of between forty and fifty soldiers' wives demanded that local merchants lower the prices of flour, as well as other essential commodities such as molasses and salt.
When merchants filed to cooperate, the women seized the food supplies and divided them amongst themselves.

                                     Reference (597)





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Slavery

1850s

Indeed, planters and yeomen joined together to support secession in large part out of a perceived sense that only by making a strike for independence could they protect household patriarchy from the corrosive forces that threatened it.

These forces, it should be stressed, were not simply the product of a fevered southern imagination.

Especially during the 1850s a sense of uncertainty about the future gathered momentum in the black belt areas of the South as wealth in land and slaves became increasingly concentrated, slave prices rose beyond reach of many aspiring planters and railroad construction integrated even greater areas of the cotton South into a market economy over which individuals exercised little control.

                                                       Reference   (597)

Hiding or Erasure of History

Germany has done a job in trying to forget the Hitler era and the lingering effects of that time in their history.

German culture demands that no one forget the atrocities of the Holocaust - this is a good thing but in order to do this one must have a thorough process of study of what, who, and why of the origins of such horrific events.

Same two-sided beliefs are occurring in the US today concerning the Confederate States of America - the same set of divisions will ensue with one addition, the mutation of such vulgarity with advancement, it is exactly how the human mind operates.




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