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Gazette journalist to speak on Rwanda
Alex Matthews

On April 6, 1994, a surface-to-air missile destroyed a private jet carrying Juvénal Habyarimana and Cyprien Ntaryamira, the respective presidents of Rwanda and Burundi. Their assassinations triggered a 100-day massacre in Rwanda. This genocide went largely unnoticed in the West, until survivors began the monumental task of counting the more than 750,000 bodies.
Sue Montgomery, a journalist for the Gazette, has been to Rwanda twice and met those who experienced the genocide. “For the most part I found it very uplifting,” she said in a telephone interview. “I found it inspirational that after what they’d been through, people could get up in the morning and they could still laugh, smile, and dance.
“The only time I ever really lost it was when I went to one of the memorial sites. It’s a school where the massacres took place and every room has skeletons from the mass graves.”
Montgomery will draw on her experiences when she gives her presentation Rwanda: Not Just Another Scary Place at the Women’s Canadian Club of Montreal on March 17.
“For the last two winters I’ve traveled to Rwanda to teach journalism at the university there,” Montgomery explained. She and many other foreign journalists have been trying to rebuild Rwanda’s media. “All the journalists either took part in the killings, fled or were killed,” she said, adding that many survivors don’t understand what a free press is.
Last year, Montgomery brought one of her students to Montreal. “He stayed with me for six weeks and it was an eye-opening experience — for him, but also for me and my family.”
One night when the family gathered for dinner, he asked, “When was this pig slaughtered and what farm did it come from?”
“It was strange for him to have all these machines in our house doing our work,” she said. “We’re so lucky here in Canada. You just can’t imagine having to flee for your life.” Many of her students were orphans. “One of my students was in one of the churches where the slaughters took place,” she explained. “He was only able to survive by hiding under the bodies.” “I had one student who was in the Congo when it happened. When she came back all of her family had been killed.”
Montgomery notes that Tutsi and Hutu tensions have cooled down in the past decade. “You’d think they’d be really bitter and angry, but you didn’t see much of that,” she said. “They live side by side and there is a certain tolerance. I think they realize that a lot of people were forced to kill or be killed. It’s just a horrible situation to be put in.”
But not everyone complied with the orders. “There were a lot of people told to do things and they didn’t. They refused.”
Montgomery said that many people became religious as a result of what they experienced.
“I think it’s a really bad thing because they turn over all their money to the Church and they’re basically brainwashed,” she said. “I had a lot of discussions and arguments with my students — many of the priests and nuns took part in the genocide.”
One day, Montgomery took her students to one of the prisons in Butare, where many inmates await trial for alleged atrocities. “There are lots of people who were going around clubbing people with their machetes and they haven’t been tried yet,” she says, adding sarcastically, “They’re all innocent of course.”
Sue Montgomery will speak Monday, March 17 at 12:30 pm at the Unitarian Church, 5035 de Maisonneuve Blvd. W. Info: 514-481-3251