WARNING: The following story contains a graphic and disturbing account of the atrocities committed during the Rwandan genocide.
Melchior Cyusa lives in Calgary with his wife and young daughter, far removed from his youth in Rwanda — but the barbaric images he witnessed as a nine-year-old during the massacre’s start in 1994 still scar his memory.
His aunt, suspecting Tutsi families would soon be killed by Hutu extremists, took her nephew and went into hiding in a grassy place she thought would be safe.
“I went and hid myself there,” Cyusa recalled from his southwest Calgary home on Sunday.
“I could hear my aunt being killed and my aunt’s daughter and so before too long, my aunt’s daughter was no longer crying. I knew they had finished killing them.”
Alone and not knowing what to do, Cyusa somehow made it back to the village his family once called home.
Back at his village, only a small number of young people remained. He learned his parents and five siblings were all murdered. The survivors lived in terror, hiding for nearly two months and wondering when their time would come.
“We were counting the days to the time that we would be killed,” Cyusa said.
During that agonizing time, more friends and family were murdered and injured, including twin cousins slashed by machetes, another devastating loss for his uncle.
“One day my uncle went and did not come with one boy,” Cyusa said. “He came with one twin but his brother had died either from sustaining the injury or have been killed along the way.”
Cyusa went on to live as a refugee in Kenya before coming to Calgary in 2008. It was 20 years after he witnessed his aunt’s death that he was finally able to tell his uncle what he saw as a nine-year-old.
“Me telling him of what I saw happening with his wife and his little newborn, I did not reveal this to him at the time. I did not know where to start. I kept that in my heart for so long,” Cyusa said.
Now, Cyusa finds solace in building relationships with Hutu members of Calgary’s Rwandan community but avoids talking about ethnicity. It’s been a long journey of reconciliation and forgiveness.
“I consider them as Rwandan and when I meet them, we speak the same language and that gives me confidence that we might build friendship along that,” Cyusa said.
“Having a relationship with them then, it’s not about me and it’s not about whether they are from Hutu or from Tutsi, but that we are all from Rwanda. That has been my guide for a few years and it’s something that is giving me strength and confidence.”
It’s estimated that up to one million Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slaughtered over 100 days between April 7 and mid-July in 1994. An estimated 70 per cent of the Tutsi population was killed.
On April 11, Tim Gallimore, the former spokesperson for the prosecutor of the UN International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, will be speaking at Calgary’s Glenbow Museum to mark the genocide’s 25th anniversary.
The Rwandan Canadian Society of Calgary will hold a memorial ceremony on April 13 at Mount Royal University.