Journey through Genocide: Stories of Survivors and the Dead
192
Journey through Genocide: Stories of Survivors and the Dead
192eBook
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Overview
Darfuri refugee camps in Chad, Kigali in Rwanda, and the ruins of ancient villages in Turkey — all visited by genocide, all still reeling in its wake. In Journey through Genocide, Raffy Boudjikanian travels to communities that have survived genocide to understand the legacy of this most terrible of crimes against humanity.
In this era of ethnic and religious wars, mass displacements, and forced migrations, Boudjikanian looks back at three humanitarian crises. In Chad, meet families displaced by massacres in the Darfur region of neighbouring Sudan, their ordeal still raw. In Rwanda, meet a people struggling with justice and reconciliation. And in Turkey, explore what it means to still be afraid a century after the author’s own ancestors were caught in the Armenian Genocide of 1915.
Clear-eyed and compassionate, Boudjikanian breathes life into horrors that too often seem remote.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781459740778 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Dundurn Press |
| Publication date: | 04/21/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 192 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Raffy Boudjikanian is a national reporter with CBC Edmonton. He has worked as a journalist in a number of places around the world, from Nicaragua to France and Montreal. He lives in Edmonton.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Preparations and Goodbyes
"This looks like it's been through a fire," the nurse in the travellers' health clinic snorts, holding the singed and blackened pages of my ancient vaccination booklet.
"It has," I reply with a grin, hoping she will inquire further, but she does not, perhaps deciding it is none of her business, perhaps deciding the conversation is too dark for a casual chat with a patient she doesn't know.
Answering her hypothetical follow-up questions on the paperwork would require delving into my birthplace, and delivering a short thesis about whether or not it is also "my home" or "where I'm from" — the type of debate that can keep many an immigrant up at night.
On October 13, 1990, that document had been tucked in a drawer in my parents' bedroom in Beirut. At the time, it held within its bright blue covers information pertaining to only the first six years and change of my existence. Like much else in that room, it did not escape unscathed from the bomb that exploded inside our third-floor apartment, shattering and scattering the glass doors to one of the two balconies.
Luckily, my parents, my sister, my brother, and I had already run downstairs into the building's underground shelter way before then. Earlier that morning, a fragment from another bomb had bored into our kitchen, cutting an almost perfectly circular hole through the wall. That had been enough of a hint: lingering in our home that day was a particularly bad idea.
We didn't find out about the fire the second bomb started in our building until the janitor burst into the concrete bunker late in the evening, warning us and our neighbours the low-rise had caught ablaze.
My dad recalls going on a recon tour, seeing the flames threatening our apartment, and returning downstairs to warn my mom. I recall the two of them deciding they needed to extinguish the fire before it spread anywhere else, and neighbours refusing to accompany them, fearing for their lives as the bombardments had barely ceased. I also recall myself and my siblings fearing for my parents' lives, and my sister in particular grumbling my parents were labouring under the illusion they were Mr. and Mrs. Superman.
I don't know who was watching over Mom and Dad that night, but they did manage to douse the fire. Later, once the sky stopped falling, we went upstairs ourselves. I quietly contemplated the soot covering their room and the adjacent hallway, darkening the bright walls, and I stared at the rubble covering our kitchen floor.
A lot in my parents' room burned that night, but the vaccination booklet pulled through. Somewhat worse for wear as the result of a few scorch marks, it nevertheless made the trip to Canada nearly a year later, along with our family.
* * *
Back at the Montreal travellers' health clinic, the story hovers untold on my lips, as the nurse carefully goes through all the precautions I would have to take for my upcoming trip to Chad, Rwanda, and Turkey: malaria pills every day in Africa, not eating any vegetables that I would not be washing myself with bottled water, shots, shots, shots ... including one for yellow fever. The latter would come with a yellow certification paper to be folded and carried in my passport at all times, lest I be detained at a border following Rwanda.
* * *
It's departure day, and I'm at Trudeau International Airport, along with my parents, my brother, my sister, her husband, and their nearly two-year-old son.
Aren has actually said "Raffy" lately, my mom and his mom both insist. I have still not had the pleasure of hearing him say it myself.
Some people can go their whole lives without ever leaving their place of birth, and others cannot stand to be stationary while there is a whole world to explore. Aren will probably gravitate closer to the latter as he grows up. Already, he's been on a couple of trips with his parents, though he has not yet completed year two. He is born into a society where he is lucky enough to have such experiences.
As we all gather around an airport restaurant table, I can't shake the feeling I am about to meet a lot of people who do not have such fortune, and who likely never will. My first stops, after all, will be at refugee camps in eastern Chad, filled with Darfuri families who have barely escaped the genocide in their home country of Sudan. By late 2011, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimated some 264,000 Darfuri refugees had fled Sudan for Chad.
We spend much of that last meal together trying to get Aren to say my name, but he seems equally as determined to keep his chubby baby mouth shut. Maybe it's because we won't let him play with the cutlery on the table, repeatedly moving it out of his grasp. At last, as we prepare to get up, he mutters "Ra-ffy," staring glumly into a pile of stale french fries on his plate.
The goodbyes are quick. The first ones, anyway. I hug everyone and march to the gates, where a security guard promptly reminds me of that cardinal twenty-first-century air-travel sin: carrying two canteens filled with water in the side pockets of my backpack.
I turn back to dump the liquid, taking advantage of the situation for a second round of goodbyes. My sister teases me about forgetting such a basic rule. My brother sums up everyone's sentiments quite succinctly: "Don't die!"
* * *
Night falls over Africa as our airplane prepares to touch down in N'Djamena, the capital of Chad.
This primarily Muslim country is considered a part of central Africa — after all, it runs on the multi-coloured Central African franc currency — but it is close to the continent's northeast. The former French colony has inherited Paris's mother tongue as an official language, though Arabic is just as common, and around a hundred more languages are spoken by its ethnically diverse population.
Chad is classified among the poorest countries by the United Nations Human Development Index; you can tell when the ones asking you for an extra franc are not only the unemployed, but people who have jobs.
And then there's the climate.
A passenger on my left, who has so far asserted his presence only by elbowing his way repeatedly through my personal space, decides to strike up a conversation on the temperature.
"I've been warned it's really hot," he says, palpable worry in his voice. His accent strikes me as African (as African as my Hollywood-trained ears can detect, anyway), which in turn, worries me. If someone from the continent (I believe he ended up revealing he was Tanzanian) is that concerned, should my own attitude toward what I have read on the matter of Chad's extreme heat be less flippant? And if he is so concerned, why is he arriving dressed in a full black suit, however sharp a figure it may allow him to cut?
"I've never been to Chad before," he continues.
"Me neither. But at least we're landing at night. How bad could it be?" I ask in a feeble attempt at reassurance.
My eyes follow his finger, tapping the screen in front of him, which displays in-flight information.
We're aboard our own Kourgig Tchalali, apparently, leaping high as the sun. At thousands of feet in the air, the temperature around us is already at twenty degrees Celsius.
I begin to share my fellow traveller's dread.
The numbers would change to thirty-seven degrees by the time we'd land. After 10:00 p.m.
CHAPTER 2
Planes, Paperwork, and Patience
"In my language, your name means future," I tell Abaka, my cab driver, staring at the dusty streets of N'Djamena through the cracks spread like a spider's web across his four-door's windshield.
He nods and curves his lips up weakly underneath his black, pencil-thin moustache. Dressed in flowing robes, like several of his fellow taxi drivers waiting for travellers in need of a lift, Abaka picked me up from the airport upon my landing, and brought me to a hotel he recommended, which I suspect netted him a commission.
Alone in standing above five storeys at the end of its dirt-road neighbourhood, the Chinese establishment Bei Fang looks over a relatively quiet block. Road traffic is scarce by day. By night, huddled masses of homeless gather around smaller buildings across the street.
The hotel boasts a courteous staff, but places me in a third-floor room with a frequently malfunctioning AC unit, and charges like a veritable Best Western or Marriott for levels of service comparable to a bad youth hostel. The Wi-Fi has no reach beyond the main floor, though there's some comfort there as I can freely lounge around a large conference room that is clearly meant for some sort of business-class clientele but remains mostly vacant throughout my stay; the TV displays a handful of channels in Arabic only, a language I do not speak or understand; and the proximity of the toilet bowl to the unenclosed shower in my cramped bathroom means I have to remember to move the toilet paper out of the water's range before deciding to freshen up.
It is better than the alternative: an online reservation I'd made at a hotel, which to this day I'm not sure exists, as calling it to confirm anything never yielded any results. I admit, though, that relying on a random stranger to safely bring me to a place to spend the night in the middle of a country where I did not know anyone was not the finest of contingency plans. In fact, during that original talk with Abaka, I fleetingly recall imagining that getting into the car of a stranger here was a fine way for a Westerner to get kidnapped. But the pickup area in front of the airport felt like an unlikely place to pull off such a stunt. Either that, or fatigue won out over paranoia.
He is a quiet fellow, Abaka. Our minimal, utilitarian conversations occur in French, and he does not say much other than thanks, good morning, good afternoon, and when am I picking you up next.
On one occasion, as he dropped me off back at the Bei Fang around noon, I attempted more small talk. "So I guess you'll continue working now, huh?"
"It's too hot to work this time of day," he said drily. "I'm going to go take a nap until around four."
Even if the heat hadn't been so overwhelming, N'Djamena was not the kind of place where a foreigner like me could run errands by walking, or by hopping on a bus. I just wouldn't be spending enough time there to become accustomed to its sprawled dirt roads.
And forget renting a car. I never asked Abaka about the aforementioned windshield, but five minutes spent on any street in the city would be enough for mostly anyone to fill in the blanks. Drivers honk incessantly, cut through lanes without signalling their intentions, and regularly miss each other by a few inches, as pedestrians do their best to stay out of the way. I'm reminded of my native Beirut, or Rome, or Yerevan just after the new millennium.
It's not just the transportation in N'Djamena that can be overwhelming for a visitor. Taking pictures or filming is forbidden, unless you have explicit written permission by authorities. You could make some attempt at sneakiness about it, but the police/army-to-tourist ratio means you wouldn't exactly be playing the odds.
None among the handful of other guests I see at the Bei Fang on evenings appear to be tourists. There's certainly not a camera flash in sight, and the language barrier makes it difficult to befriend them.
Sitting down at a table at Bei Fang's ground-floor reception hall, I banter with a handful of Egyptian guests while munching away at a dinner plate that has way too much meat and no greens on it at all. Of course, it's not that the presence of the latter would make a difference anyway, since I have strict instructions from the travellers' health clinic nurse not to eat vegetables I have not washed myself. To my surprise, the men ask the hotel's manager, who seems eager to please her customers, to provide the reception hall's wall-mounted flat-screen TV with access to a channel they'd really like to watch: the CBC.
It feels completely extraordinary, downright wonderful to me, that Africans are familiar with my employer, Canada's public broadcaster, when I've sometimes found myself having to explain its existence in the country's mostly francophone province of Quebec as the "English-language version of Radio-Canada." On a couple of occasions, I've had to actually clarify I'm not from the news agency branch of a certain major Canadian bank with an acronym the CBC is just one letter shy of. Beaming with pride, I tell the Egyptians I work there back home. They're delighted at first, then puzzled at finding out I don't speak Arabic.
When our enterprising hotel staff successfully fulfills their request on the next evening, I see the root of the confusion: theirs is not the CBC at all, but the cbc, the Capital Broadcasting Center, an Egyptian entity that shares the three letters of its call sign, but not their case, and little else with the Canadian organization.
* * *
Armed police and men in army fatigues patrol most of N'Djamena, and wall-sized posters of President Idriss Deby also keep watch over the populace. No ignoring the cliff's edge here; Chad precariously balanced on it in 2008, with Deby's troops barely able to crush a rebellious uprising. Opposition forces reached the capital, and were pushed back only thanks to assistance from the French army. Now the country's government is more like a rock climber after a slip, trying to clamber back over the brink.
The atmosphere this creates does not exactly scream travel-friendly, and it was indeed a rarity for me to encounter anybody coming to Chad for anything other than work reasons.
If you are a foreigner here, there's a good chance the business you're visiting on has to do with the UNHCR.
It runs several camps on the rim of the Sahara Desert, near the country's eastern border with Sudan, hosting people who have escaped Darfur.
So far, the UNHCR had proven fairly accommodating, indicating in preliminary communications before I left Montreal that I would have a chance to visit two different refugee camps: Goz Beïda and Farchana. Still to be settled was the matter of a translator. I'd need one, as most of the refugees would be unlikely to speak English or French.
* * *
Abaka drives me to my first meeting with UNHCR officials in the Chadian capital, to further set up the trips to the camps.
The compound itself reinforces the point that N'Djamena is no picnic. The container units carved out into air-conditioned offices hunker down behind barbed wires, concrete walls, guards, and metal gates. I can get in through security only after exchanging my journalistic ID for a day-visitor's pass. An irrational part of me fears I'll never see my journalist ID again.
My contact is as friendly in person as he's been through emails and over the phone prior to my flight. We easily mix French and English, a practice I'd assumed I'd leave behind in Montreal, as he explains that I should be able to stay at Goz Beïda for just under a week, and about the same amount of time in Farchana.
That should allow me, I thought, to interview a number of genocide survivors before flying to Rwanda, my next destination. My trips within Chad will be done by plane, too. Some nine hundred kilometres separate N'Djamena from Goz Beïda, the further of the two camps. With normal road infrastructure, you could drive there in about a day; but there's no such animal in much of this country, and so the UNHCR plans to arrange me a seat on a U.N. World Food Programme flight. Quicker and safer, I'm told, than days of driving through blinding heat.
Recovering my press pass with ease (and shame about my earlier misgiving about ever seeing it again), I move on to my next errand, dealing with Chad's one major inheritance from France besides la Langue de Molière: onerous bureaucracy.
As well as requiring travellers to fork over a hundred dollars weeks in advance of their trip to get a visa stamped onto their passports, Chadian authorities also insist you visit a local police station upon your arrival.
There, you must earn a further couple of colourful stamps on your passport by, among other things, filling out two forms so obsessed with obscure life details I'm surprised Facebook hasn't bought the rights to use them.
Abaka waits outside for me again. As I walk into the station's courtyard, I hear a new nickname given me by a curious local patrolman, a name that emphasizes just how rarely foreigners visit Chad. "Monsieur le blanc," ("Mr. Whitey," roughly, in English), he baptizes me with a laugh, then points me to a small administrative building.
Inside, the lights are off and the door open, an almost futile countermeasure to the stifling heat.
A bored receptionist watches as I scribble my name, the name of my father, the name and maiden name of my mother, my date of birth, place of birth (you know, some of the stuff that's already on my passport, which was already stamped with a visa), original nationality, current nationality (it falls short of asking for a future nationality), marital status, religion, denomination, etc.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Journey Through Genocide"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Raffy Boudjikanian.
Excerpted by permission of Dundurn Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
- Preface
- An Introduction
- Chapter 1: Preparations and Goodbyes
- Chapter 2: Planes, Paperwork, and Patience
- Chapter 3: Victims of the Janjaweed
- Chapter 4: The Country That Would Rebuild
- Chapter 5: He Who Chases Genocide
- Chapter 6: Lost Tourist in the Mist
- Chapter 7: Rosette
- Chapter 8: The Strangest Birthday
- Chapter 9: Facing the Music
- Chapter 10: The G Word
- Chapter 11: Cover-Up City
- Chapter 12: House and Home
- Chapter 13: What To Do About the Past
- Epilogue: Origins and Returns
- Afterword
- Acknowledgements
- Bibliography
- Index