It finally happened. After a long advocacy campaign, the memorial sites of Bisesero, Nyamata, Gisozi and Murambi are now on UNESCO’s World Heritage List, joining Auschwitz-Birkenau as the only genocide memorial sites ever inscribed.
For us survivors, this means a lot. The listing gives international protection and recognition to the places where so many of our loved ones took their last breath. It gives me hope that their stories will be kept, and that future generations around the world will learn what happened there.
The genocide tried to erase the Tutsi for good. Seeing the places where our people were slaughtered recognized by UNESCO gives back some of the dignity that was taken from us. It also eases, a little, the old wound of a world that ignored us during the killings. It is a relief to know these places will stand as proof against denial.
Of course, this is only a first step. As survivors, we still have a duty to honor the dead and to teach others what happened. It is painful, but I keep speaking out so that my family, the more than one million Tutsis, and the moderate Hutus who were killed are never forgotten. We must stand together against those who still threaten these memorials or deny the genocide.
The current government deserves credit for ending the genocide in 1994, but it often puts controlling the narrative first, using the genocide to justify its authority. The ruling party’s interests are not always the same as ours, the survivors who carry the weight of loss. I hope this recognition leads to more open conversation and gives survivors, with all our different views, a bigger role in caring for the memorials and in education.
Some past government decisions worry us, like the controversial 2016 law declaring all genocide memorials state property. Since then, many local, community-run memorials have been removed or merged, disrupting survivors’ mourning and cutting families off from the places where their loved ones rest.
Memorials and their exhibits should stick to the facts and stay free of political agendas. The UNESCO listing protects these four sites, but the damage is already done to hundreds of small memorials across the hills of Rwanda.
I appreciate the government’s work to secure this recognition, and I hope survivors will now have more say in decisions about memorials. We should not be sidelined for political gain.
For those of us who lived through 1994, the memorials make our memories real. They hold the evidence, and they are resting places we can point to.
Now on UNESCO’s list, these four memorials will outlast us. Long after we survivors are gone, the genocide will not be reduced to a footnote.
That brings some comfort, even if the wounds never fully close. Ends.
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