Search results
Representations of Rwanda have been shaped by the display of bodies and bones at Tutsi genocide memorial sites. This phenomenon is most often only studied from the perspective of moral dimensions. This article aims in contrast to cover the issues related to the treatment of human remains in Rwanda for commemorative purposes from a historical perspective. To this end, it is based on the archives of the commissions in charge of genocide memory in Rwanda, as well as interviews with key memorial actors. This study shows the evolution of memorial practices since 1994 and the hypermateriality of bodies in their use as symbols, as well as their demobilisation for the purposes of reconciliation policies.
This article describes the brutalisation of the bodies of Tutsi and Jewish victims in 1994 and during the Second World War, respectively, and contrasts the procedures adopted by killers to understand what these deadly practices say about the imaginaries at work in Rwanda and Poland. Dealing with the infernalisation of the body, which eventually becomes a form of physical control, this comparative work examines the development of groups and communities of killers in their particular social and historical context. Different sources are used, such as academic works, reports from victims organisations and non-governmental organisations, books, testimonies and film documentaries.
The after-effects of mass atrocity – bodies and bones – struggle to be defined within memorial projects. This article seeks to examine the politics at play in displaying dead bodies to interrogate the role of materiality in efforts to memorialise and raise awareness about on-going violences. It focusses on the nexus between evidence, dignity, humanity and memory to explore bone display in Rwanda. It then takes up two artistic projects that play on the materiality of human remains after atrocity: the art of Carl Michael von Hausswolff, who took ashes from an urn at the Majdanek concentration camp and used them as the material for his painting, and the One Million Bones Project, an installation that exhibits ceramic bones to raise awareness about global violence. In thinking about the intersections between human biomatter, art and politics, the article seeks to raise questions about both production and consumption: how bones and ashes of the dead are produced, and how they are consumed by viewers when placed on display in a variety of ways.
113 5 (Re)cognising the corpse: individuality, identification and multidirectional memorialisation in post-genocide Rwanda Ayala Maurer-Prager Leontius … saw some dead bodies lying near the executioner, and he felt a desire to look at them, and at the same time felt disgust at the thought, and tried to turn aside. For some time he fought with himself and put his hand over his eyes, but in the end the desire got the better of him, and opening his eyes wide with his fingers he ran forward to the bodies, saying, ‘There you are, curse you, have your fill of the
169 Chapter 8 Genocide and the ICERD William Schabas Although there is no reference to genocide in the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD/the Convention), the Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD/the Committee) has shown a special interest in the subject. Ironically, CERD examined the periodic report of Rwanda in March 1994, only a few weeks before the outbreak of the worst episode of genocide since the adoption of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the
It all started with a strange coincidence, when American Jacqueline Novogratz was only twenty-five years old. It was 1987, and Novogratz was working in the Rwandan capital, Kigali, to establish the country's first microfinance institution for women. Jogging through the streets one day, she was stopped in her tracks by the appearance of a young boy ‘wearing the sweater – my sweater ’. She thought back to her childhood, growing up as the oldest of seven children in a working-class family in 1970s Virginia. Only receiving new clothing on special
people in ‘developing countries’. When still a fresh-faced charity worker in Rwanda in 1987, Novogratz saw a boy in the street wearing her unique beloved blue knitted sweater which she had treasured as a child growing up in the US but later thrown in a local clothing donation box. In the decades since then, the image of the sweater has been a key prop for Novogratz as she travels the world to promote the work of Acumen as the best way to recognize the profound ways in which we are all connected by globalization and to remedy the gap between rich and poor. Yet, as Kish
traditional mechanisms like the Rwandan gacaca. Its frameworks are mostly based on international human rights and international humanitarian law. The International Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD/the Convention), the foremost human rights convention that seeks to address racial discrimination, has not been part of the framework for analysing conflicts and human rights violations in transitional justice processes.13 Yet available literature suggest that a major cause of some contemporary forms of conflict 8 Lydia A. Nkansah
the massacres of communists in the 1960s, Muslim or Buddhist rituals were replaced by various forms of religious syncretism.8 More recently, in Rwanda, Evangelical churches have rushed into the breach left open by the nervousness of the country’s Catholic Church, some of whose members were caught up in accusations of participation in the genocide, thereby offering a space of charismatic renewal in Christian ritual practice.9 In all of these cases it is as if the sheer scale of the murder and its unique nature prevented an extension of the usual funerary rituals to
Kurds of northern Iraq (1991), Somalia (1992), Bosnia (1992–95), the intervention of the Economic Community Of West African States (ECOWAS) in Liberia (1990–96), the US-led intervention in Haiti (1994), French-led forces in Rwanda (1994), NATO’s intervention in Serbia and Kosovo (1999) and the Australian-led intervention in East Timor (1999). In Rwanda effective French intervention came very late, following three months of genocidal massacre by the Hutus of