Rwanda

A stench like you've just woken up the day after a night on the town and found your best friend dead and half rotten under the bed. Nakedness, starvation and war is everywhere. Little children with swollen bellies and missing limbs pointing AK47's at you, staring with hollow eyes. I'm in Rwanda. And I ask myself why. Why would anyone want to go here? It's fucking hell here. A place where it takes 800 000 people 3 months to die isn't exactly my idea of a nice place for a vacation.

Rwanda is a country split up by ethnical differences. The two main ethnical groups are the Tutsi's and the Hutu's. In colonial times, the Tutsi's were treated way better by their white masters, and were therefore somewhat of an upper class when the civil war broke out. Now, the civil war happened in times of real economic despair and things weren't made better by the president Habyarimana's loss of popularity ratings. Some Hutu radicals formed the Rwandan Patriotic Front with the ambition to overthrow the current Tutsi president. After months of discussion, a peace treaty was signed, and ignored, as the RPF supposedly shot down the presidential airplane, killing president Habyarimana. Revenge was sought out by the presidential guard, and under their influence, a militia of vengeful Tutsi's formed. It didn't take long for mayhem to break out. War was all over, innocent people were shot, not-so-innocent people lived, and the powers of the west didn't give a shit. And then there was GENOCIDE.

I was there for about a week in June, staying at a Best Western in Kigali with a gang of other reporters from around the world. We didn't see much of the destruction, because we spent most of the time sitting scared as hell in our hotel rooms, waiting by the radio for another UN report of what was going on. But none of us understood anything at all, it was all too big and nasty for us. The few times we dared go out were horrible. Things weren't that bad at all in Kigali, compared to what was going on in villages around the country, but still. There were little kids wobbling about in the streets, and older kids waving machetes and guns, screaming at each other. It was like all the adults had gone away, and left their young to take care of things. I soon understood where the adults had gone. They were either dead or on their way to Tanzania. As we were escorted by jeeps around town by hired