Who are the Survivors?
Definition provided by Jean Gakwandi, a Rwandan survivor of genocide.
We understand by "survivor" a person who has escaped a planned extermination of a group of people to which he belonged (genocide). A survivor can be also a person who escapes a natural catastrophe, calamity or an accident. A person or group of people will be called survivors when they are part of a "little that remains" of a bigger group of their initial number.
In all cases, survivors are always a minority in comparison to the initial group that was targeted.
In case of genocide, a survivor is in general a person stripped of everything and everybody. He/she will be most of the time a widow, an orphan or a widower without biological relatives and in rare cases an entire family can survive but has no collateral relatives.
In the context of Rwanda, the government in place before and during the genocide of 1994 had sensitised and mobilized one group of the population to exterminate another one based on ethnicity. The policy was a radical extermination and was called a final solution. The targeted group was that of Tutsi. A Hutu who opposed this policy was also killed, but in most cases his family was spared. So, here we understand that the term of survivors applies to Tutsi and on a small scale a political Hutu opposing genocide.
The survivors are usually deeply traumatized. Some came out of dead bodies and are witnesses of horror scenes that cannot quit their minds. The majority of women who survived have been raped and contracted diseases such as HIV/AIDS. A mother becomes childless; a child becomes a sole survivor child - orphan.
Children live by their own and in this way they have no rights to be children at all. They must live as responsible adult persons.
A survivor of genocide in Rwanda is a person who is alone and suffers a feeling of rejection. He is in a continual fear and mistrust although they are usually not afraid to die. He/she has visible and invisible scars. He/she may have permanent infirmity. He/she has deep wounds in her heart and may also have developed some psychosomatic problems.
Despair, disgust of life, desire to suicide, lack of interest in material things are common. If no one approaches them with love and understanding many end up by suicide. Many cases have been recorded.
Another traumatizing thing oppressing survivors is that they have never had time to mourn for their loved ones let alone to bury them. I am reminded here of a child who kept going to the market place looking at the face of every man in his eyes, asking him if he may be her father.