I set foot on the red dirt of Rwanda for a nearly a week in July of 2004. I arrived by bus from Nairobi, Kenya where I had arranged a summer elective for my medical degree. The capital city of Kigali is nestled among the rolling green hills that coined the nickname of the small central African country. "The land of a thousand hills," was not known to the masses of the so-called civilized world before the genocide of 1994. Most Canadians still can't find it on the globe. And really, why should they? On most any map, Africa's most densely populated country is so small that the name itself cannot fit within its borders.

Anatomy of a genocide

For those too young or unfamiliar with recent African politics from a decade ago: Over the course of one hundred days in the spring and summer of 1994, over 800,000 citizens were slaughtered by governmentsponsored Hutu extremists in the most efficient extermination of human life in the history of the world. The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki aside, there has never been a greater loss of human life in such a short period of time. The murder rate in Rwanda surpassed even that of the Nazi gas chambers of World War II. To put it into perspective: imagine a country with the population of Ontario where 8,000 people are killed every day for 100 days straight. That was Rwanda in 1994. The targeted victims were members of the minority Tutsi tribe and any Hutu moderates perceived to be sympathetic towards the "cockroaches."

What makes this massacre even more horrific is that the victims were put to death by their neighbours with crude handheld weapons such as machetes and garden tools, since bullets were too expensive. I had the opportunity to speak to a number of people on both sides of the historical conflict. The topic of the genocide did not always come up, but it could always be felt in words of its witnesses. It was not always possible to tell if those I met were victims of the violence, perpetrators or both.

I visited the southern village of Nyamata with a small group of travellers I met in the capital. On the edge of town there is a small brick church that marks one of thousands of massacre sites around the country. The victims believed they had found shelter in a house of God and barricaded themselves in the church; unfortunately, their terrorists were not deterred. Over the course of just five days, 10,000 Tutsis and Hutu moderates were killed. The entire process was aptly described to me by one genocide survivor:

"They didn't kill 800,000 people. They killed one, and then another and another…"

What remains today in Nyamata is no longer a site of worship but a memorial to those that lost their lives to unimaginable hatred. It remains unchanged. The walls have gaping holes where the mob had gained access. The ceiling is peppered with thousands of tiny holes that allow the sunlight to shine through, creating a planetarium effect. The unnatural cause of the spectacle was grenade shrapnel; dozens of bullet holes marked the walls under the watchful eye of the remaining Christian statues that remain. The banner that hangs across the entrance is translated from the local tongue, Kinyrawandaise, reading, "If you knew us and you knew yourselves, you would not have killed us."

We were escorted around the memorial site by a survivor- a small greying man in his sixties whose only non-native language was French. A special memorial was built in a series of newly constructed caverns. Long bones and skulls of the victims are laid out on shelves in glass casings. There were too many to count. Below the church, there is a coffin. Our guide told the story of the person who was laid to rest inside:

During the massacre, a young woman was tied down and violated many times before a spear was pushed through her from bottom to top, and her lifeless body was then thrown down a latrine onto a pile of corpses. When her body was discovered not long ago - among the pile of rotting carcasses - it was found preserved in some unnatural way.

He described how she was properly laid here to rest in the memorial below the church. The story, shocking yet not uncommon, was difficult for me to translate to the other foreigners in the group.

The moment of absolute tragedy struck after the impromptu tour, as we stood in silence before the compound. The small group was a mix of tourists and local people. Our guide pointed to a young man, not much older than I, and told me, since I was the only one who understood French, that he was the brother of the woman below. He was the only survivor of his family - everyone else had been eliminated. Overwhelmed by emotions that I have yet to sort out, I did the only thing that to me seemed proper to me; I walked over and hugged him. I know that I will never completely understand this man's pain.

Healing continues; scars remain

Rwanda is not a manufactured death facility. It is a country. One that, in the face of so much recent pain and suffering, is moving forward. Its torment is still not over. Although the killings in the region have subsided and relative stability has embraced the land, many of the people on both sides of the atrocities remain. There are survivors who know which of their neighbours killed their loved ones. Paul Kagame, the general in charge of liberating his people from the genocidiares and Rwanda's first popularly elected President, remarked, "Ten years on, the survivors of these gruesome crimes still suffer in silence. There has been dual survival; survival of the ordeal and survival of the aftermath of the genocide. A decade has done little to alleviate the anguish." The scars remain as the healing continues.

The international community could not have failed Rwanda any more if it had tried. Even the UN Refugee camps in Tanzania and the Democratic Republic of Congo (Zaire) largely served as staging areas for the genocidiares to perpetuate the killing. After all that has occurred, I am amazed that the Rwandan people are not bitter towards the world that ignored them in their darkest hour. They welcome foreigners and tell their stories of loss and heroism without disgust or hostility. They have an ability to overcome these obstacles in Rwanda that the rest of the world may never comprehend.

International responsibility

The world stood idle while Rwanda descended into chaos. Thousands of troops and millions of dollars of aid money poured into the former Yugoslavia, while the entire first world stood by and watched while one of the most brutal genocides in history took place in central Africa. The international peacekeeping community was in Kigali in the form of the United Nations Aid Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) when the slaughter broke out. It is now widely accepted that military reinforcements on the order of 2,500 troops would have ended the killing and stabilize the region. Instead, member countries such as Belgium and Bangladesh pulled their existing troops out of Rwanda, leaving an impotent UN force that could only witnesses the slaughter.

Retired Canadian Lieutenant General Romeo Dallaire, who in 1994 was in Kigali commanding UNAMIR, returned to Rwanda for first time this year. He said, "The Rwandan genocide happened because the international community - if I may be brutal, as the genocide was - didn't give one damn for Rwandans because Rwandans don't count. Rwanda is of no strategic value to anybody, and has no strategic resources." I believe he is exactly right. If this tragedy took place anywhere in the western world, the international community would have immediately put an end to the massacre.

The onset of the Rwandan genocide coincides with the same week that Kurt Cobain joined the so-called 'stupid club.' While the Echo Generation mourned the death of an angry man with a guitar, the real tragedy was unfolding an ocean away. The ten-year anniversary of the massacre's onset came and went on Apr. 7, 2004. With the exception of Belgium, Rwanda's colonial forefather, not a single western leader thought it important enough to attend the memorial ceremonies. Not even Kofi Annan, who at the time of the genocide was ultimately in charge of the UN peacekeeping forces in Rwanda, made an appearance.

"Failure of Humanity"

On my last day in Rwanda, the flame at the Kigali Memorial that marks the one hundred days of the Rwandan genocide was extinguished until next year. In 1994 the world stood idle while hell engulfed Rwanda. As Dallaire describes in his bestselling book, Shake Hands With The Devil, the situation was a, "failure of humanity." The collective international community is responsible for the past and the least we owe Rwandans is not our sympathies, but a future.

When I began to share my experience in Rwanda, my frustrations with the genocide were evident. A friend of mine passed on a quote from a different time and context, yet it appropriately applies: "It would be so much easier to just fold our hands and not make this fight - to say I, as one man, can do nothing. I grow afraid only when I see people thinking and acting like this. We all know the story about the man who sat beside the trail too long. . . It grew over and he could never find his way again. We can never forget what has happened, we cannot go back nor can we sit beside the trail." - Chief Poundmaker, 1842-1886

Right now, another gruesome version of the same events is taking place in the Darfur region of Sudan. The World Health Organization has reported that 70,000 people have died in the region while the world continues to diplomatically debate whether the definition of genocide applies. It is our responsibility as a just society to actively stop any clear violation of human rights and prevent it in the future. We are failing miserably. Let us stop sitting beside the trail.

Jason McVicar is a third year medical student at the University of Manitoba,Canada.