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Currency: Rwandan Francs, 800 to the pound
Cost of diesel: 60p a litre
1st December
In Rwanda now. We spent last night at the Parc Des Volcanos (sic) in the north. This is where everyone goes to see the gorillas. We couldn’t afford this but wanted to go to the park anyway to do some trekking in the Volcanoes. However, after waiting for ages at the park headquarters for anyone to turn up we left! Most people don’t stay in the park; they just come to see the gorillas and leave. At 350US (soon to rise to 500US) per person they are making a lot of money out of this and therefore don’t care about independents like us. There are no facilities to stay in the park, the first time we’ve encountered this in any park anywhere. It’s a real shame because the park looks beautiful and the volcanoes are just begging to be trekked. So we camped in the garden of a local hotel and left this morning to head to Lake Kivu in the west. This is where we are now. Camping options are limited in Rwanda and bush camping isn’t advisable because of the proximity to Congo, a country still utterly sunk in civil war. We did get to within 5km of Congo and this is as close as I want to get! We’re staying in a place called Kibuye on the eastern side of Lake Kivu. It is (yet) another stunning and enormous lake that I’ve never heard of. These lakes are enormous, you can’t see the other side or either end. However, they don’t even rate a dot on a large map of Africa because of the size of the continent. For example, Congo is two thirds the size of Western Europe and it’s only the 3rd largest country in Africa! We’re heading to Nyungwe Forest tomorrow to track so more chimps and then to Kigali for Amy’s birthday.
The mountain of the big teeth, Parc Des Volcans. This where the gorillas live.
Rwandan rainforest and Like Kivu.
2nd December
Well, our good luck with the national parks continues. We drove down Lake Kivu, which is a beautiful drive but an almightily crap road. Our average speed was 25kmph. When we finally got to the park we discovered that they had quadrupled all their prices meaning we couldn’t afford to go in. This now makes this park the second most expensive (the Serengeti is the most) place to camp in all of East Africa. Seeing as they only had 65 visitors in 1997 and 2000 last year you’d have thought they might have tried to do a bit more to attract people, instead of hiking up the prices. Anyway, we decided to head to Kigali a day early and we’ll be here for the next 3 days.
3rd December
We just returned from the Kigali Genocide Museum. I don’t know what to say really, it is so unbelievable moving and horrific at the same time that words are hard to find. It is really well done. They don’t pull any punches and make no excuses about how terrible it all was. They present it as a time line, with the events leading up to it (including the very successful part both the French and Belgium governments played in initially creating the previously non-existent racial tensions and then how the French bankrolled the horrifically racist and persecuting Hutu government all the way up until the genocide happened. For example, 6 months before the genocide happened the French government lent the government 12 million dollars to buy weapons, from a French firm incidentally, these were then the primary weapons used by the genocideries when the killing started. Even when the killing did start the French sent troops in to rescue their ex-pats and actually aided the Hutus in rounding up the Tutsis, who were then murdered. Not a particularly honourable history if you ask me). They then detail the killings, showing how people were killed, the weapons used and then onto how life is after the event. The murders were horrific. We all know the figures, 1 million killed in 100 days. However, until you’ve seen the photos of Kigali high street with bodies littered all over it. Not just fresh dead, but people who had been there for weeks and just left, it is hard to comprehend. They have a photo of a church that has 2000 dead bodies in it. It looks like something out of a film but it is real life. They list the names of children, some only a few weeks old, who were hacked to death with machetes. I went to the Jewish memorial, Yad Vashem, to the holocaust many years ago with my mate Sam, although I can’t remember the exact details of what the place looked like, the absolutely haunting nature of the place has stuck with me to this day. This place is the same. There were people in there crying, one man was so distraught he had to be carried out by the Red Cross team that are permanently based there to consol and help victims etc. It was almost unbearable to see that. Quite how this country is going to get over it is beyond me. This was families murdering families, neighbours killing neighbours. People who had been friends for years suddenly killed each other. This might explain the feelings we are experiencing here. The people are polite but not at all friendly. Everyone we have seen has a kind of world weary look about them. There is not a lot of smiling, unlike the rest of East Africa. These people seem to be completely and understandably destroyed by what happened 12 years ago. There are signs next to all the roads saying no more genocide and the government under Kagame seems to be doing all it can to promote racial harmony. The sad thing is that until we intervened this is exactly what they had; now it is a disaster. The most ironic thing I have heard recently is that the French government have had the nerve to accuse Kagame of being complicit in the genocide, that he participated and actually caused it to start. Kagame is so incensed by this he has expelled the French ambassador and all French ex-pats. Too bloody right if you ask me, it was the French that gave the Hutus the weapons to kill the Tutsis! Quotes from the BBC website:
“France backed the Hutu government at the time.”
“At the time of the planning of the genocide the French government had 47 senior officers embedded into the Rwandan army, which subsequently played such a large role in the genocide, and the best informed government of (them) all of what was going on in Rwanda was the French,"
No wonder Paul Kagame is a little pissed at the French for accusing him of starting the genocide. The most likely people were extreme Hutu militias who wanted to stop the Hutu prime minister from signing a peace treaty with Kagame and the RPF. Sorry, didn’t mean to have a rant there. It is just so unbelievable what happened that when you are confronted with it face to face it makes you think. I will just add though that although the French were obviously pretty useless (to put it lightly) in doing anything about the genocide, neither were the rest of the world. The UN General, Romeo Dalliare, in Rwanda at the time had been writing to the UN for months saying that something terrible was about to happen and he needed a force to stop it. He asked for 5000 men, he got 270, and these were all Ghanaian volunteers, no wonder he was able to do bugger all about it. Dallaire, resigned in disgust after the genocide and has since written some excellent and damning books on the UN about their failing at the time. Kofi Annan has said that we (the West and the UN) are as guilty of participating in the genocide simply because of the fact that we stood by and let it happen. Why didn’t we intervene? No-one has come up with a good answer as yet. The US were reticent about getting involved because only 12 months previously they had seen the dead bodies of their peacekeepers dragged through the streets of Mogadishu after the Black Hawk down incident and although this doesn’t mean they should never get involved in peacekeeping again, it does, at least go some way to explain why they didn’t get involved. However, the rest of the world has no real excuse. There has been much genocide in history: The Jews in WW2, the Armenians in WW1, The civilians in Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge, the Balkan crisis and by Christ we have to make sure it never happens again. There is a great quote at the memorial that says “it takes a long time to plan a genocide” and this is so obviously true that we have to get better at identifying when and where they might occur and get involved, regardless of the cost. Having said I didn’t know what to say I’ve just written 2 pages!!
