Unearthing, untangling and re-articulating genocide corpses in Rwanda

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the mass graves and exhumed bodies of victims of the Rwanda genocide and war of the 1990s. A government-led programme of exhumation of mass burials and individual graves has taken place over the last decade. The exhumation of mass graves has been undertaken, in the main, by Tutsi genocide survivors who work under the supervision of state officials. Post-unearthing, these bodies are unravelled, and the remnants of soft flesh, clothing, personal possessions and bones are separated from each other. Skeletal structures are fully disarticulated and the bones pooled into a vast collective, for placement within memorials. The outcome of these exhumations is that remains almost always lack individual identity at the point of reinterring. A productive analytical comparison is found in examining exhumations of Spanish Civil War graves, where the fates of individual dead are closely entangled with the lives of survivors. Here there is a clear contrast with exhumations in Rwanda, in the possible re-articulation of identities with specific human remains. But a similarity is also critical: in both cases the properties of human remains, as unsettling materials, garner specific 'affects', which drive forward national political projects that aim to consolidate particular collective memories of conflict, albeit that this kind of 'material agency' is mobilized to very different ends in each case.Le présent article porte sur les charniers et les corps exhumés des victimes du génocide et de la guerre des années 1990 au Rwanda. Au cours de la dernière décennie, le gouvernement a mené un programme d'exhumation des fosses communes et des tombes individuelles de victimes. Des exhumations de charniers ont été entreprises, pour l'essentiel, par des survivants tutsis du génocide travaillant sous la supervision d'agents de l'État. Après déterrement, le corps est démêlé ; les restes de tissus mous, vêtements, effets personnels et os sont séparés les uns des autres. Les structures squelettiques sont entièrement désarticulées et les os regroupés en grands amas pour être placés dans des mémoriaux. En conséquence, à l'issue de ces exhumations, les restes sont presque toujours dépourvus d'identité individuelle au moment d'être redéposés. L'examen des exhumations de tombes de la guerre civile espagnole offre une comparaison analytique fructueuse: le sort de l'individu décédé est étroitement lié à la vie des survivants, et un contraste est manifeste étant donné la possible réarticulation de l'identité pour chaque cas. Une similitude est également cruciale: dans les deux cas, les caractéristiques des restes humains comme matériaux troublants recueillant un «affect» particulier font avancer des projets politiques nationaux qui visent à consolider la mémoire collective des conflits, mais c'est une agencéité mobilisée à des fins très différentes.

Imagining genocide heritage: Material modes of development and preservation in Rwanda

“…So, while the renovations were indeed a significant shift, they also continued to move the memorial in the same direction as it had already been heading. The commitment to providing ‘burial with dignity’ for many of the victims (Korman, 2015; Major, 2015), rather than allowing their remains to be exposed and scattered, as much as practical efforts to ensure favorable conditions for material preservation, spurred these changes.…”

Salutogenesis and the Prevention of Social Death: Cross-Cultural Lessons from Genocide-Impacted Rwandans and Indigenous Youth in Canada

“…Locating and burying the remains of loved ones killed in the genocide is a major issue in Rwanda where the connection to ancestor spirits is of great personal and cultural importance. 90 An AERG member described a burial ritual for a member of a New Family who had lost biological family in the genocide whose remains had never been recovered.…”

Displaying dead bodies: bones and human biomatter post-genocide

“…As a result, I focus on the transnational and international dimensions of the consumption of genocide memorialisation rather than on the gravesite itself or the local dimensions of that memory, as others have discussed. 13 Bodies and bones have a particularly strong role to play in Rwandan genocide memorialisation, 14 which provides a useful case for interrogating the global politics of visibility because it is at the nexus of multiple competing and intersecting narratives at the international, national and local levels. In Rwanda, this is perhaps ampli ed even further in that literally hundreds of thousands of human beings simply disappeared, and unidenti able bodies cropped up in their place, in churches, in elds, in rivers.…”