Many descriptions of the genocide of the Tutsis by the Hutus referred them back to back. They conveyed a little music, particularly in France, that of the thesis of reciprocal carnage, of an atavistic hatred of two camps fighting for power. The images of Tutsi survivors of the genocide were also rarely shown, the emphasis being placed on the evacuated Belgian or French nationals, a blackout which reinforced the culpable indifference or compromise of their countries. It is to reappropriate these images, or rather her images, that Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse wrote The convoy, she who was, with her mother, exfiltrated on June 18, 1994 from Butare to Burundi by members of the Terre des hommes association, in front of the lenses of an Italian photographer and BBC reporters. She was 15 years old.
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Every survival is a miracle that we cannot explain, wrote Charlotte Delbo in The Convoy of January 24. Beata owed her salvation, in particular, to her skin color – she is mixed race, which made her White in the eyes of the Hutu genocidaires – and to an astonishing composure, which suggested that she dare to assert that she only understood French at the time when her mother was asked to show her identity book marked with the fatal mention “Tutsi”. In front of the Hutu leader, she then said, for a child and in these circumstances, this astonishing sentence: “François Mitterrand is your friend, if you kill a French woman, he will be angry with you and stop helping you. » Don’t they say that the truth comes from the mouths of children? Paradoxically, her life was saved thanks to François Mitterrand, whose name mentioned as a threat held back the killers’ arms. Guts and willpower, young Beata must have had it in spades, if we are to believe the slap she gave her mother, who, tired of hiding, told her that she wanted to surrender: “You’re not going anywhere. We must live. »
Quest. The convoy is not the first story of a survivor of the Tutsi genocide. If this testimony of hellish days is nestled at the heart of the book, its raison d’être lies elsewhere: having become a member of a humanitarian association in France, Beata, pregnant, discovered in 2009 the images of her convoy of June 18 taken by the BBC . Then, in 2011, one of the English journalists, still traumatized, sent him four photos showing children in trucks on the border with Burundi. She doesn’t see herself there, even though, thanks to the help of a nun, she and her mother were the only people over 12 years old admitted in this convoy. It would take another ten years before she decided to search for the children captured in these images. To make this story your own. In the meantime, she has taken a detour into fiction – three books that rehash her Rwandan history. The time to be able to go back to the other side of the mirror, to recross this threshold which that day marked the separation between an announced death and an indeterminate future.
Why this quest? To prove that they were there on June 18, 1994, of which she kept certain indistinct memories. She smiled as she crossed the border, supporting him, to her great surprise, the Swiss humanitarian Alexis Briquet, organizer of the convoy, whom she met shortly before his death. To share with other survivors this memory of a unique moment, never explored, which preceded their dispersion. To also restore the little-known work of these humanitarian convoys which recall the Children’s transport of Jewish children exfiltrated from Germany, Austria or Czechoslovakia between 1938 and 1940. His obstinacy and the difficulty of his investigation to obtain other photos also reflect the burial of a still recent genocide. But it is at this price that Beata will be able to discover herself in one of the photos. To say the unspeakable is also to see the invisible… §
” The convoy “, by Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse (Flammarion. 336 p., €21).
2024-01-22 07:09:51
#story #children #survivors #Rwandan #genocide
